Melissa Coulter has begun training her newsroom colleagues at The Quad-City Times about blogging and social media tools to help reporters cover their beats better.

There is a difference between training people on how to blog or how to get on social networks and training people how to use those tools for beat blogging. Coulter focused on the latter. At its core, beat blogging is about using social media, blogs and other Web tools to help build networks around a beat.

Print beat reporters have networks around their beats too, but they are smaller and usually comprised of insiders. Beat blogging is a sort of Rolodex 2.0 that allows people to expand their beats and connect with people they would have never been able to otherwise. These larger networks make it easier for beat reporters to report.

This first round of training Coulter conducted was an hour long, introductory presentation. It was more about introducing people to the possibilities that beat blogging and social media offers and to get people thinking.

“It sparks a lot of interesting conversations,” she said. “This is sort of a first step to get more people in our newsroom to use these tools for reporting.”

The training went well and spurred discussion, but, like in all newsrooms, there were people who were unsure about this new technology. The biggest concern that Coulter ran into is whether or not beat blogging and social media would be worth their time. After all, many journalists are already very busy because of staff cuts.

“It’s sort of a chicken and an egg question,” she said. “It takes time to build your audience when you’re beat blogging, and I think they sort of expect to have an audience right out of the gate like they do when the newspaper drops on the front porch to 50,000 subscribers.”

That is a real risk. Some reporters will find tremendous success with beat blogging and social media, while others will receive a more tepid response from users. A large part of success is knowing which tools make since for each beat and how to go about using these techniques for each beat.

A one-size fits all approach will probably lead to a lot of failure for reporters. At the Quad-City Times, Coulter gave a general presentation, but she also works with individual beat reporters to see what could work best for their beats. She also showed examples of people who were doing beat blogging well. A great way to quiet skeptics is to use examples from beat bloggers like Kent Fischer, Eric Berger, Monica Guzman, et al that we have chronicled here at BeatBlogging.Org.

Some of Coulter’s colleagues who had been practicing beat reporting gave examples of some of the success they have had. They talked about how their audiences have grown and become more helpful over time.

“Just hearing from their colleagues really impacted them,” she said.

Coulter said that examples from beat reporters about their success seemed to have a bigger impact on her colleagues than her lecturing to them. Some people are resistant to beat blogging and social media for other reasons, like not being that comfortable with technology and the Web.

“That’s just going to take some hand holding, quite frankly,” she said.

The Quad-City Times probably has a more active newsroom with social media than is typical because of Quadsville, the dedicated social networking site that The Quad-City Times built for its readers. All employees at the paper are encouraged to go on the social network and interact with people in the community.

“That sort of forced them to get a little more comfortable with this technology,” she said.

Her editor in chief told her after the session that she wanted her to do it again, but this time it would be mandatory for all beat reporters.

Coulter gave this final bit of advice:

“The best way to convince them that this is useful and to teach them  how to do it well is to have them read the blogs of people doing it well.”

Also check out our interview with Mary Louise Schumacher about the newsroom training she gave about social media.

Some more topics discussed:

• How many people in your newsroom are on social networks already? Which networks are they on?
• What suggestions would you have for other people interested in conducting beat blogging and social media training in their newsroom?
• What are the advantages of beat blogging? Why get into social media?

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.