Ben Wagner – Editor, MTV’s Game Blog
This morning I had a quick but interesting chat with Ben Wagner an MTV editor who has been involved in some interesting citizen journalism projects recently. Also on the call was Stephen Totillo, our video game beat blogger. The three of us discussed the two projects that Stephen would like to attempt (details here).
While nothing has been agreed upon, I can safely say that what Stephen and Ben want in this second, more open project, is to enable a broad range of citizen journalists and video game lovers, with tools that will let them instantly inform Stephen as a reporter. The question, however, is what is the best format to do this?
Twitter has come up – and we have an idea for a use of Twitter’s API which might be built: (think Twitter100 meets Google’s Super-Tuesday Twitter map).
We haven’t committed ourselves to anything yet. First we want to really examine what it is we want to achieve: "A way for readers to swarm around and inform Stephen’s beat," said Wagner. The tech will come as a solution for that, not as the imputes.
TrueHoops Has A Vision for its Network: “Trying to Have a Weekly or Bi-weekly Conversation Via GTalk.”
I had a brief conversation with Henry Abbott last Friday. The gist of that conversation is below.
I have a file where I’ve got everybody I want to invite, all I have to do –
is send out the invite.
I’m going to start by trying to have a weekly, or bi-weekly, conversation where we weigh in via GTalk or conference calls.
I’m going to invite and write some key sources. And if people can’t come in at that time, I’ll let them weight in by email.
It will start with me organizing everything, but I’d like to have it in a manner where they can contribute without me having to oversee every second of it eventually.
At first I imagine I’m going to have to explain what this is, that will get us started, but once they see it’s part of a group, I hope that it will flow just like a conversation between important people in basketball and then hopefully some people will step up who are ready to take on bigger roles.
I want to start with 14 or so people. I’m trying to get good people involved and in a week and a half I’m going to the All Star game so I talk to some people there. I also have a lesser known NBA player who might be involved and a player in Europe. I can’t make promises now, but I’d like to have an NBA player as part of my network, along with coaches and managers.
Once this is going, I imagine it’ll move fast. It’s just a good way to really get people to talk to me and feel like they are in full control. Nothing will be off the record – but they can be in full control over what they say. If they don’t want to talk about it, don’t type. But I hope that because it’ll be a conversation, things will get spelled out more.
Miriam Pereira: The News-Press – “To Provide a Forum So People Can Help Each Other.”
The lead reporter who covered the child welfare beat at Florida News-Press left the paper to work with the child services PR firm. As a result, Florida is still in the early stages of the beat blogging project – trying to figure out the best way they can move forward without a beat reporter at the helm. That makes for a sticky situation, because as I explained to Miriam Pereira, one of the assistant metro editors, if you build something, they come, and nobody takes the helm you may end up with a dead network in a matter of weeks and a few burnt sources.
That said, Meriam is interested in either building the network or finding a way the paper can build the network together. They hope to have a reporter on the beat by the end of February or early March. They are also moving to Pluck soon, which will enable social networking on their site.
Tell me about the beat and why you stuck with it as the beat blogging project even though the reporter is gone?
"I get calls from people about children issues all the time. Whether these cases are true, I don’t know, but we need somebody there full time pretty soon. It’s a high profile beat because our Child and Family Services is not in the best shape. They’ve had some high profile deaths of children in their care over the last few years.
It culminated last year when we had a round table with the judge that oversees child welfare cases and the head of the child welfare in the state and 20 other people from child welfare services and we started talking about why the system is so scewed up and what we might do to help. We have made some progress and certain records have become public and child services has become more forthcoming, but now we get calls all the time from people wanting us to help them. I guess they think we are social workers, which we are not because there is stil a fine line about what we can and can’t do to aid sources. But we do want to provide a forum so people can help each other.
Then we started pulling together most of the coverage that we’ve got or have done and we have a database of daycare centers and the total number of children that have died while in contact with the department of child and family services.
What will we be able to do when we get a reporter?
At that point we will have better social networking tools and a new design. We can use that software for this page and we can get a group of people to start it for us. Whether it’s another organization to be a resource and help this page, we aren’t sure. It might be something simple like inviting one of these people to blog for us once a week — or come in and do a chat with us: if you have questions about child welfare issues you can do a QA thing.
Right now what we are doing is a team effort and it will have to stay that way until we get that department of child services reporter and then have that person be the gatekeeper.
[Next we talked about what the beat bloggers have done so far. The cliffsnote version is: Thought about tools, have started writing a pitch letter and a few have launched new blogs or started Ning social networks. The best "team" network advice I could give (and comments are welcome if there is a better way to do a team network) was to start a Google Group and invite sources and reporters into the group. Again, however, I advised to only do this if somebody would make sure it was seen through and continued.]
John Hassell: Pharmalot – “It’s the Wisdom of the Crowd Around Him…How Do You Take that to the Next Level?”
Ed Silverman, editor of Pharmalot has the luxury of working only online. But don’t think that means he slacks off. One look at the blog and you’ll realize that Ed is "a machine," as his editor John Hassell noted.
John and Ed are looking into different ways to utilize social bookmarking sites or social news sites to tap into the wisdom of the crowd that has grown around Ed’s blog. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
So what do you want to accomplish?
Ed has been blogging for a little over a year, Pharamlot just had its birthday, and in many ways he has approached doing this with a lot of the same thoughts that are driving the beat blogging project. He wanted this to be a collaborative experience and to develop relationships with his sources.
It seems to us that there are other opportunities, using various new technology platforms and services to find other ways for Ed to connect with other sources. He would be the first person to tell you it’s the wisdom of the crowd around him that makes the blog work. The question is, how do you take that to the next level?
What are the realities you face in the newsroom?
Ed is covering an industry in and around people in the industry. The trick is to have a relatioship with sources, understanding that many people in any industry are not always free to speak publicly about what they know or think. So how do you harness the wisdom of the crowd that can’t always speak publicly to other members of the crowd? That’s what we have been wrestling with.
Step one to go in that direction is to come up with some kind of a network of people who know this stuff inside and out who can share what they consider important — either by name or not.
We will also set up a Twitter feed of headlines from Pharmalot and Ed will interact with readers that way.
I’m not sure that we need a full social network. I don’t want to be closed off to doing a full fledged site if it makes sense, but at the moment I don’t see that as the best way to approach this. Between the RSS feed and emails Ed has a long list of sources and people he can tap and direct at any time, so the network is there. He has the ability to throw questions out there and get responses.
The really simple thing to do is get a group of 30 people and put them in a forum, but I don’t want to do that.
We want to give readers access to what some group of knowledgeable people believe to be important at any moment of time – and we are looking at various tools in the social recommendation, social bookmarking realm to accomplish that and we are hoping to move on that soon.
What is the technical support like?
Whatever we decide to do with the blog we can do. Pharmalot is hosted externally, we do all the design and development. It’s really one guy who does it all – and works closely with Ed.
As soon as we are ready to something — it will happen really quick. If we were doing this on another project we might not have that same flexblity or freedom – but we are very lucky.
Chris Graves: Cincinnati Enquirer – “Allow Them to Comment Together, Build Photo Galleries, Blog, Without Any of Our Intervention.”
Keith, from the Cincinnati Enquirer, is one of two beat bloggers who are brand new to their beat. Above that, Keith is new to the city – and his beat, covering Proctar and Gamble is tied to the city of Cincinnati where the company and its employees are based.
This means Keith is going at a slower pace than others in building his network, because first he needs to get a feel for the beat. I checked in with new media editor Chris
Graves to get a sense of what is in store.
What do you expect to see in the beat blogging project?
I try not to presume what the life of the blog is and where it will go. We’ve found that it changes and morphs over time depending on what the writer and audience decide. Hopefully in this blog they will decide together. Locally the Proctar and Gamble blog has a lot of potential because its the biggest consumer products company in the world and it is local. It’s about the products but also how Wall Street is affecting P&G. Unlike a sports blog, which is what the team has done well here with baseball, this is about a business subject. Keith is developing his voice and getting his feet under him. It’s interesting to watch the different topics he is on.
I guess what I’m saying is: There is no steady "this blog will accomplish X" goal. It is a wonderful addition to the whole offering of blogs and columnists in the traditional newspaper. The business aspect is a little new. I hope that it does build a community, I’m curious if a lot of people from P&G will comment or if it would get snarky. It doesn’t appear that it is right now. What the community becomes on Keith’s blog, we have to be open to it. Does it just become a place where people rip on P&G, I don’t think as a newspaper that that’s our sole mission. Or even the sole mission of a blog about any large entity. As a beat reporter he represents the inquire into P&G so I wouldn’t want it to turn into angry noise. I don’t want his reputation tied to anything like that. That’s something we want to balance, we don’t just want ex-P&G employees dissing the company.
What tools does Keith have?
We are poised and waiting to install new social networking tools. Our software solution, which is blogger, doesn’t allow for group blogging in the way that you can create a community of 15 people. But we are moving to Pluck, which will allow us to create persona pages. In the next 2-3 months we will have the ability for Keith to go out and look for groups that need a place where they can create a persona page or a community that will allow them to comment together, build photo galleries, blog, without any of our intervention, we just provide the tools and oversight. We will get this extended toolbox of stuff that will allow us to go out to groups or users — and let them define their community and whatever that looks like.
It’s not a local decision, it’s corporate from Ganett, but we are excited about it.
Several of us Tweet and we just had a meeting about the potential of Twitter in a different way. I’m sort of intrigued by how it could be used and how other folks are using it.
[I talked about building a posse for beat blogging and interviews]
We could go into the template and install a Twitter box for Keith. It’s actually a pretty good idea. We would have to evaluate it because we are affiliated with a news organization, but in the journalism business more information is better than less information.
We would have to use the right mechanism. Twitter might work well for a beat with early adapters who are tweeting from text and IM, I’m not sure that would be the P&G crowd, I would have to defer to Keith to know that.
[I talked about going where your audience already is, not forcing them into a platform they aren't familiar with]
I would challenge Keith to sit down with their PR folks and marketing folks at P&G to see what they are using to stay in communication, because that means the employees are using it too.
Kevin Bushweller: Education Week’s Goal: “Identify Problems and Come Up With Solutions…Together”
Kevin Bushweller is Education Week’s assistant managing editor. I caught up with him to talk about the future Ning site that Digital Directions is going to launch soon and the most poignant thing he brought up was that he wanted the network to have a goal. To identify the top 10 problems that educators are focusing in terms of technology and possible solutions. I think giving the network a focus and goal will prove to be very constructive down the road. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
What vision do you have for beat blogging and how will it play into the rest of the magazine?
In the greater vision of the magazine it fits in perfectly, the task we are trying to pursue is to get this group of people together working towards identifying and coming up with solutions for the top ten challenges in educational technology today. The magazine itself is very organized towards helping people solve their problems and thats how we approach things. So the beat blogging project from my perspective as an editor will lead to some excellent things in the magazine – in helping people tackle the problems they are facing.
So when do you think the Ning site will launch?
We just launched the new and improved website for Digital Directions online. We are still working out some kinks right now, so it’s a hard to know. Michell has taken the lead and done some things with the Ning site – and is beginning to build a location for the project. Now what we have to do is put the message out to people out there: "Hey, do you want to join us in this social network where we are going to identify problems and come up with solutions."
We have people that contacted us by email who are interested in participation and we have put together a list and soon we will send out invites to get this thing going.
On a day-to-day basis: We are basically going to work on it every day, even if it’s just putting stuff up online related to the social network. But it’s hard to know right now exactly what the day-to-day is going to be like. It will definitely have a prominent place on this new and improved site. We want it to be a strong partner with the site, but until we get it going its going to be hard what to know what that is. But we want to drive people from Ning to Digital Directions and vice versa.
What’s the situation in terms of tech support?
We have no technical backup, that’s why Ning works really well for us. We are a relatively small publishing operation. Everyone wears a lot of different hats. We don’t have the luxury of being able to say – we are going to have the top of the line very complex technological backbone for this, but when Michelle said Ning was relatively easy, simple and something she could figure out on her own, that seemed like a good solution. —
Being able to have Michelle take the lead, that’s how we will make things happen. Otherwise it’s a lot of waiting around. I want to get this rolling to get it successful.
Do you have any fears?
I don’t want it to turn into a giant crowd of noise, where it turns into a gazillion people just yapping at each other and not accomplishing some things that could really help us and help themselves. So figuring out how ot make positive things happen, that’s important. Starting it with this goal of identifying the top ten ed-tech problems and coming up with solutions is key. I just don’t want it to be a giant information noise where a lot of people are talking but nohting is happening.
If there would be another concern, it’s that we wait to long to get things started.
The Realities of Beat Blogging: Getting to Know Your Tech Situation – A Reality We All Have to Deal With
This morning I spoke with Scott Clark, general editor and Dwight Silverman, online editor, of the Houston Chronicle.
The purpose of the conversation, which I will repeat with all the beat
blogging online editors (get ready editors) is to find out what the realities
of the newsroom are in relationship to what the beat bloggers ideally want. They each want to build a social network to aide their reporting, but this requires some time from the tech-savvy developers in their newsroom and those people are always high in demand.
If the beat bloggers want to build a Facebook group there are no
bottlenecks, other than their own technical ability. But if a beat
blogger has more ambitious ideas, as Eric Berger the science reporter for the Houston Chronicle does, then there is a technical and bureaucratic bottleneck.
Aggregating Conversation: Pharmalot and the Beat Blogging Experiment
Note the levels of engagement that John Hassell denominates. A beat blogger has so many choices and variables – each network truly is individual.
|
