Podcast: Levinthal on starting a beat blog to meet users’ needs

Dave Levinthal and his colleague Rudolph Bush started The Dallas City Hall Blog after seeing the success of blogs like the Dallas Independent School District Blog and various political blogs on the Internet.

“We saw that and saw the benefits of them having a blog, and wanted to go ahead and do it ourselves,” Levinthal said.

But there was another reason for starting it too.

“We have a need for this,” Levinthal said.

There was news not being reported because of a lack of a dedicated online presence for the city hall beat, while other news was simply not being reported in a timely manner. 

“[We started the blog] to give ourselves a medium where we could grab in all those snippets of news that fell to the floor,” he said. “Those are little inside baseball nuggets, those are the sort of light hardhearted side of politics, breaking news that often would have to wait until the next day or be buried somewhere else on the Web site.”

Now Levinthal and Bush can even beat their broadcast counterparts to the punch with their beat blog and live blogging efforts. Before the beat blog was established, Levinthal worried if a news item would show up on the 6:00 or 10:00 news, before The Dallas Morning News came out the next day. Levinthal never worries about that anymore. 

Levinthal and Bush have also benefited from going niche on the Web. Before they had their own blog, they used to post to a general news blog for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That may have been okay for the occasional breaking news item, but it wasn’t a good way to cultivate a beat online.

The Dallas City Hall Blog is a haven for political and government news junkies. It’s the place to go for both in-depth features and up-to-the-second tidbits. 

“You can talk about the decline of circulation for newspapers all you want, but I think the fact of the matter is … that more people are reading about Dallas city news and Dallas political news than they ever have been,” he said.

Before the beat blog, Levinthal relied on a much smaller group of sources. These were proactive sources that would contact him when they wanted to get something out. Levinthal also had to work the phones a lot, trying to find information.

“The fact of the matter is, most people are not going to take the time or want to make the effort to pick up the phone and call you, unless they are a regular, trusted source of yours,” he said. “Now people who may care about a specific esoteric issue … they have no qualms about firing an e-mail off to you saying, ‘hey I have information about this, that or the other thing.’ All the sudden you’re a conduit for information and tips. Some of our better stories this year have come from that kind of interaction.”

Levinthal has had stories that he originally imagined would be blog only published in the print edition. He did a blog post critiquing and rating each Dallas city council members Web site and digital presence. The Web sites ranged from very basic with an about page and some contact information to very elaborate with information on online contributions, blogs, video, audio, etc.

Levinthal gave each council member a letter grade and tried to see who had the best digital presence. It was a fun little feature.

“Editors at the paper ended up really taking a liking to it,” he said. “We ended up doing a whole big spread in print. That’s one example where the blog is driving the print product, as opposed to the print product driving the blog.”

Why should a beat reporting start a beat blog? Levinthal thinks its a necessity in this day and age. 

“It gives you the opportunity to get more depth, more breadth and, again, more immediacy to the news that you’re writing,” he said. “Frankly, although that’s more work for us and you find yourself up at all hours updating the blog and what not, it has really helped our beat reporting, and I think we simply do a better job of covering our beat.”

Some other topics discussed:

• How does a beat blog change print reporting? Is it a major paradigm shift in how you do journalism?
• How to build a relationship with a blog user to make them into a trusted source.
• How have your editors reacted to the blog?
• What is the future of the Dallas City Hall Blog? What does the next year hold?

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