Leaderboard - by Patrick Thornton on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 18:50 - 5 Comments
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.
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5 Comments
I’m probably not posting this in the appropriate place, but I’m in need of advice from beat bloggers. I’m the Web editor (a new position) at a small daily in Kansas trying to get some staff blogs going. My editors have reservations about the whole thing, especially if there’s no editor reading posts before they go live. My thought is that we hired these folks to be professional journalists, to report thoroughly, to proof and to spell check, and that they would carry that through to their blogs. And I think seeking prior approval would bog down the process and take away from the immediacy of blogging. Plus, I’d receive all our reporters’ blogs in my RSS reader and would review them daily, though not necessarily before they’re posted. I’d also be available for discussion with any reporter who was unsure about whether to blog about a particular topic or make a certain statement.
My question is: Do your papers require editor approval before posts go on the Web? Why or why not?
A caveat to anyone thinking of co-opting the Comment of the Week idea: it ain’t easy.
I started handing out COWs on Mondays, figuring it’d be an easy breezy way to get a quickie post up first thing Monday morn. And when our blog was receiving 50 comments a week, it was. But now that we’ve built a bit of a following, we’re getting +250 comments weekly, and that’s a lot to sift through.
So the COW has become a bit of a weekly albatross, actually. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t recommend doing it — I would and do. But you can’t half-ass it. You have to read all the comments and put some thought into picking a winner. Because when you phone it in (which I did a coupla times) the readers notice. And they LIKE the COW — when it’s not there, they notice and when you phone it in, they notice.
Emily,
If you were to dust my blog for fingerprints, you won’t find any belonging to editors. Our blog is 100-percent reporter driven. I report. I post. My editor sees it when my readers do. And that suits me fine.
The power of blogs is in the immediacy and the give and take between blogger and readers. Editors, it seems to me (frankly), would would just muck that up. I can’t imagine writing a post and then waiting and waiting and waiting for an editor to approve it.
Emily, I’m with Kent. The speed of reporting on a blog just doesn’t fit the edit-first model for news. I’d say if you maintain regular conversation with reporters, you know the kind of stuff they’ll be breaking on the blog. And you should encourage that.
Trust me, when you get real discussion on the blog and start breaking some stories, it’s a ton of fun.
I’m going to guess that the biggest hurdle you’ll face is teaching reporters that a blog isn’t just a glorified diary.
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Cool, thanks.
Yeah, CoveritLive is great: easy to use, flexible and quick to set up. I’m still working on building hype around the liveblogs, but I’m also picking some medium-interest topics so I know how to use the tech when (if) it hits the fan.