DISD blog wins national education reporting award

Two of our favorite beatbloggers, Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs of the DISD Blog, were recognized by the Education Writers Association for the best multimedia education blog.

The Education Writers Association (EWA), the national professional association of education reporters and writers, today announced the winners of the 2008 National Awards for Education Reporting, the prestigious national competition for education writing. The annual contest honors the best education reporting in the print and broadcast media and is the only independent contest of its kind in the United States. Contest entries were limited to stories published or broadcast for the first time during the 2008 calendar year.

Fischer and Hobbs will find out for a few months why the judges picked them as the top multimedia education blog, but Fischer said their application focused heavily on community aspects of their blogs and the conversations they created. Fischer and Hobbs also made it clear that this was a hard news blog that regularly broke news.

“This award tells me that we’re not wrong — all of us journalists who know that blogging extends our reach into the community,” Hobbs said. “The EWA award validates that the Dallas ISD blog is a ‘multimedia’ reporting tool that can be used to help tell a story.”

The DISD blog has been a success for the Morning News when measured by a variety of metrics: content created, pageviews, user conversations and content that originates on the blog and makes it into print. Editors want to try to bottle some of the lessons and best practices from the DISD blog and share them with the rest of the newsroom.

“There is definitely here at the Morning News a growing effort to take what Tawnell and I have learned from our year of beatblogging and to spread the word, the gospel so to speak, to other reporters on other beats who are interested in dipping their toes into beatblogging,” Fischer said.

Fischer will be conducting brown bag lunches where reporters and editors can come and learn about beatblogging. He’ll be explaining what beatblogging is, examples of what he and Hobbs have done and how he approaches the art of beatblogging.

There will also be beatblogging sessions aimed at editors. Fischer said editors’ roles are changing, and because of that editors have to change their expectations for the kind of work that will produced and how much of it will be produced.

“Beatblogs aren’t successful if editors don’t change the ways they manage reporters,” Fischer said. “A beatblog is practically a full-time job in itself. You can’t have the same level of expectations on your reporters to produce for print and then sort of throw a beatblog on top of that and expect it to be a success.”

Fischer said people at his paper are beginning to realize that pageviews aren’t enough when measuring success or failure. It’s now becoming about creating niches and communities online that are highly focused. They believe these highly focused audiences will appeal much more to advertisers.

“I think what they’ve come to realize is that to be successful online, it’s not about total pageviews, it’s about creating a community in a sort of a dedicated core of community members who are going to be highly engaged and conversant with each other on niche topics,” Fischer said.

Fischer and Hobbs are still working out how to best work on two distinct products with unique audiences at once. Both work on the blog and create content for print. They still have to do a lot of duplicating content between the mediums.

“I find the print product to be frankly annoying,” Fischer said. “I don’t think about print anymore. I come in everyday, and I blog. Blog posts that blow up on me, become really popular and get lots of comments, those become candidates for print stories. If I blog all day and I don’t have anything that blows up like that than I consider myself not to have anything cooking for print the next day.”

Kent and I also discussed many other topics for this week’s podcast. Those topics include:

• What newsroom technology hurdles do you run into? What can’t you do because of the limited Web technology you are allowed to use?
• Who will be attending the beatblogging training sessions?
• What do you hope reporters and editors get out of the beatblogging training sessions?
• How has your beatblogging changed in the past year?
• How are the beatblog and print audiences different? How does that impact content creation?

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