Leaderboard for week of 1-19-09: Users adding value

This week’s Leaderboard is about users adding value to journalists’ content.

Good beat bloggers build strong communities around their beats. These communities not only can help journalists report news and stay up-to-date on industry news, but they can also add value with strong comments after posts. Slashdot in particular has made an art form out of having comments after posts be more valuable than the original posts themselves (not coincidentally, Slashdot has one of the best commenting systems around).

Just about all of the beat bloggers we follow have built strong communities. These communities help journalists report, but there are some beat bloggers who have built such strong communities that their users and their comments and links are just as imporant as the original content itself.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

• We’ll say it again, Comment of the Week is a feature that every beat blogger should copy.
• So many journalists are worried about allowing comments on posts and other content. Want to know a great way to get great comments from users? Acknowledge when users leave great comments. That’s exactly what Fischer does, and his blog has some really good comments. It also has a strong community around it.
• Fischer regularly interacts with users on his blog, and this is a key to building a strong community around a blog. By interacting with users, Fischer also has fomented a stronger and more civil community around his blog.
• Many news organizations have done a wonderful job of creating comment ghettos, filled with inappropriate, acidic, banal and often off-topic comments. These comment ghettos represent everything that many journalists hate about user comments.
• Fischer and other beat bloggers have prevented comment ghettos from forming by being active in their communities. Acknowledging when users leave comments that really add to the conversation is another great way to prevent comment ghettos from forming.

Matt Neznanski | Corvallis Gazette Times

• Live blogging is a great way to utilize the Web in ways that print never could. Services like CoveritLive make it easy for journalists to cover live events in real time. Twitter is also another popular way to provide real-time coverage of events.
• Live blogging is much more than just providing instaneous updates. It’s also about allowing people to have a voice. CoveritLive, Twitter and other services allow users to submit questions and make comments. A journalist can take this real-time questions and ask city council members, for instance, their thoughts.
• A live blog also has value after an event is over. CoveritLive makes it easy to create an archive of a live blog for users to read.
• Neznanski shows the power and immediacy of live blogging when he recently covered a City Blog meeting on homelessness. CoveritLive is quickly becoming a big-time tool for beat bloggers.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post

• We’re continually amazed by the quality of the community around Krebs’ Security Fix blog. Good beat blogging is a way to build a strong community. Security Fix reminds us of Slashdot but with better original content.
• Krebs routinely makes posts that his users add additional insight and links in the comments section. Krebs himself is also very active in the comments section, answering questions and helping users out. There is an incredible sense of community on his blog where people are there for each other.
• This past week Krebs reported on fake online shopping sites that were trying to spoof legitimate sites. The debate and discussion after the post is arguably better than the original post itself. Users are sharing more fake sites to avoid, ways to tell if a site is fake or has a good reputation and tools people can use to make e-commerce safer.
• This is what happens when you build a strong community of knowledgeable users. It’s hard to imagine Security Fix without user comments. Many journalists fear user comments, but Krebs and Security Fix show how comments can add a lot of value to journalism.