Expert community builder and comment cultivator Monica Guzman recently gave a talk where she implored people to be quality commenters and not trolls.

I would certainly recommend showing this to your Web site users. Maybe it will help spur some better conversations. But Guzman also says that news organizations and journalists have to take ownership of the comments on their site.

Guzman says this means providing the right tools for community moderation, having enough resources to police that community and recognizing that news is a conversation.

But you knew all that good stuff already. Right? The rest of Guzman’s talk is about how our users can make the whole experience better.

Some of the points that Guzman made:

• Choose your story wisely — Guzman says that no one cares what you have to say on a Britney Spears story or on a liberal/conservative debate. Those comments and debates always turn out poorly.
• Focus on what’s smart — Comment on something that’s smart in a story or something that you like about it. Pointing out accidental misspellings doesn’t forward the conversation along.
• Tell us what you think — But of course think first. You know, read the whole story first.
• Tell us your story — “Quote yourself.” Guzman wants you to tell your story in the comments section. And maybe you’ll become a new source.
• Tell us what you know — Post links, talk about studies, add to the conversation, etc.
• Ask a question — Ask a good question, and you might get a great answer.
• Introduce yourself — Own up to your ideas.

Yes, it’s really that simple (hat tip to Chris O’Brien for finding this video).

With a smaller staff at my news organization, we’re at a disadvantage when it comes to covering some stories the way they deserve, but one of the strengths of our newsroom has been breaking news coverage. I have a few people who’ve taken to using social media tools for our work, and it’s actually helped us do our jobs better. One of our reporters and a few of our video journalists have started using Twitter and Qik to provide news coverage faster than our counterparts.

It’s been fairly simple with the technology and even more so because my coworkers believe it’s to our benefit as a news organization. Let’s face facts: No matter what technology is available, if you don’t have people willing to try, it means nothing. We’ve been lucky since more and more people in our newsroom have been willing to accept the benefits — or at the very least, try them out — of social media and its strengths.

One of my favorite examples has been our recent coverage of an apartment fire . One of our VJs carries a jailbroken iPhone loaded with Qik (he’s one of five VJs with Qik installed). Once the fire call came out, Sam Lerma headed to the scene and immediately began streaming with his iPhone. He had some extra scene video as well as an interview with the fire department spokesman. But here’s where we did better than every other news organization in town: We had it live. Using Qik’s embed code and adding it to our story, we streamed Sam’s interview and had promotion from our breaking news coverage to give us a nice boost on our page views and time spent on our site.

Of course, our story’s no Hudson River plane ditching, but it’s one of the ways we bring breaking news to our readers. I know we’ve done a good job because when news breaks, our numbers spike. We’ve earned the respect of our readers by offering them another way to get news as fast as we can provide. One of our reporters keeps his iPhone ready to do video and send photos so we can show images without having to wait for videos to be fed.

While most of our guys have iPhones, two have Samsung phones that also work with Qik, so it’s not necessarily that you need the latest, most expensive technology. You have to be, however, willing to try with whatever you have or can afford. Social media is a wonderful tool when used correctly, but as I wrote above, you have to be willing to try what’s available.

The best tools mean nothing if you’re not willing to try.

I often use my blog to write about pieces of an interview and sometimes entire stories that there just isn’t room for in the paper and to cover events that end too late to make deadline.

Using the blog to write about items that won’t fit in the paper has become an important part of my beat at The Quad-City Times. My news organization, like many newspapers across the country, recently reduced the size of its paper. Most of the time all there is room for in the weekly entertainment section I write for are 15-inch stories, including breakouts.

More often than not I have funny quotes and vignettes left over from interviews that my readers would be interested in but just won’t fit in print. Now I can put them in my blog.

My most recent example of this was in a preview of the dance group the JabbaWockeeZ.They are coming to a local event center with New Kids on the Block. When my 15 inches were up, I still had more to write about but, while interesting, it wasn’t essential to my story so I put it in a blog post.

I also covered a teen film festival put on by our local library. For the festival, area teens learned how to make videos, and their movies were screened at a local IMAX theatre. When I covered the festival last year, I wrote 10-inches ahead of time from an interview with a librarian, talked to the teens before the event and then had to leave before the screenings started in order to make deadline. Not this time.

Last winter the Quad-City Times moved to two editions, so my deadline was even earlier this year. Instead of writing a crappy story that barely included any quotes from the teens that actually made the movies for the festival, I chose to preview the event in print and blog about the post-event coverage so I could do the festival justice.

Granted, I didn’t write my post like I would write a story, but instead I wrote a the short, conversational tone that I take in my blog. But I’m much happier with the end product than I would have been if I had just topped off a pre-written chunk with a quote from a teen, which is all I would have had time for if I covered it for the print edition.

I also routinely use my blog to review local shows that are of interest to my readers, but aren’t quite big enough to warrant a review in print.

Excerpts from my blog are run in print in our entertainment section each week, so our core print readers are reminded on a weekly basis what I’ve been up to online. The comments I hear from readers are that almost everyone reads me online and about half read the shortened versions in print as well.

But no matter where they read me, they’re able to get content that I would not be able to write about if it weren’t for my blog.

Ed Silverman, one of the original and best beat bloggers, is leaving The Star-Ledger and Pharmalot.

Silverman discussed both lessons he learned from Pharmalot and the reasons why he decided to move on in this week’s podcast. You can find more information about Silverman’s decision here as well. He spent two years working on Pharmalot, but it really took him a year to really become the efficient, prolific beat blogger he was.

“It took me a year to really get a groove going in terms of how to manage my time and to develop the best routine so I could be efficient and effective,” he said. “It’s the sort of work you have to immerse yourself in and learn the hard way.”

One of Silverman’s biggest lessons for would-be beat bloggers is his work ethic. Silverman doggedly worked his beat, often putting in long hours many days in a row. He completely immersed himself within the world of pharma, becoming one of the leading sources of information on the industry.

“To make the kind of site that I had going, I really had to read everything I could,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to really become so intimately familiar with a subject so that you know when something pops up you can say, ‘yeah that’s old.’”

Silverman believes it takes long hours to make a successful blog because there are so many blogs available. He said that if he just worked four hours a day on Pharmalot that the site wouldn’t have gotten nearly the traffic. Pharmalot was able to garner 11,000 unique visitors a day partly because it had so much news and information on it, and the site was updated throughout the day.

“If you’re going to be a go-to-site that’s going to offer more than just selective items and to do what I did and provide a wide variety of items … you have to put in long hours,” he said. “The site has to be constantly refreshed.”

The hours he worked were considerably differently than when he was a newspaper reporter. He said writing for print was more like working bankers hours, compared with the varying and sometimes long hours of blogging. 

Despite the success of Pharmalot (plenty of visitors and page views), there was never any talk of adding additional staff onto Pharmalot. Unfortunately for Pharmalot, as the site was ascending, the Ledger was descending. The financial situation of the paper didn’t afford for an expansion of new media projects like Pharmalot.

“The paper took precendee and they had to do what they were doing to prop up revenue and keep down expenses,” he said. “The timing was both fortuitous and unfortunate. It’s sort of a sad irony.”

Silverman does believe that Pharmalot could be a viable entity on its own, without the backing of a major media organization like the Ledger. Pharma is a global beat that appeals to many people, and Pharmalot was able to capture a sizable audience in two years. 

“The economic environment has to be conducive to that of course,” he said about a site like Pharmalot trying to go it alone. “Timing is everything, right?”

Silverman may be blogging again for his new employer Elsevier, a publisher of science and health information, but his exact role has yet to be decided.

Other topics discussed:

• The reasons why Silverman thought it was time to move on. 
• Silverman’s role as an aggregator and how it made him more of an editor than a writer.
• Key tips for would-be beat bloggers.
• What is the fate of Pharmalot? Will the site be retired?
• Can you separate Pharmalot from Silverman? Would a Pharmalot without Silverman really be the same blog? 

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

At best, many journalists would have posted a small note on their blog and then went on with their day (or a brief in the print edition the next day, after the outage had been corrected). But if a journalist wants to keep getting tips from readers, it’s a good idea to provide a service back to readers. The reason this became a big story for many of Horowitz’s readers is that Bright House’s Web site went down due to an overload of traffic, and their phone lines were perpetually busy.

Horowitz promptly put a note up on his blog and then tried to contact Bright House to find out what was going on. Horowitz’s readers began commenting when their cable went down and where they were located in the Orlando area. This began to form a picture of how widespread the problem was and when it started.

That small note that Horowitz posted was later updated five times with new information throughout the day as Horowitz was in contact with Bright House. Horowitz told readers why service was interrupted (a corrupted database) and provided updates on when Bright House thought service would be restored. He also provided readers with information on how to get some of their service restored by unplugging their cable wire from the cable box and plugging it directly into the TV (this would give most people some of their cable service but without HD).

Horowitz provided a public service to his readers and they were grateful that he did. Many readers could not get through to Bright House, while Horowitz was able to get in touch with a spokeswoman for the company and get updated information throughout the night.

The original blog post received thousands of page views, 560 comments (as of publication of this post) and spawned two print stories. And perhaps most importantly, Horowitz provided a public service to his readers after they tipped him off to the initial story.

If Horowitz simply posted a note on his blog that said, “Bright House digital cable service is down for many people in the area,” and left it at that, he might not get that many tips in the future from readers. Many of his readers already knew that cable service was already down. What they want out of a journalist like Horowitz is why is the service down, when will it be restored and is there anything that readers can do to speed up the process or get some of their service back?

Beat blogging really is a give and take. It’s not about marketing the same old content in new ways or pushing old content onto new platforms. Beat blogging is about expanding ones network of sources. Many of these new sources are not the traditional insiders, but they can help reporters do their jobs better and easier.

But a journalist isn’t going to get a lot of tips if it’s always just take, take, take. Beat bloggers and readers help each other out. Success on social media requires a give and take, and that can be a tough concept for many journalists accustomed to one-way communication to understand. 

Writing about cable outages might not be the sexiest story or win awards, but I can guarantee you that many people are very thankful that Horowitz gave them this information. This kind of coverage probably gave both Horowitz and his employer some good will. Without Horowitz’s coverage (and sounding board for angry customers), Bright House customers might not have gotten a credit.

Horowitz also used Twitter to update people about the Bright House situation. Many people had questions on Twitter about the situation and about getting a credit for lost service.

Here are a sample of some of the questions that readers left for Horowitz on his blog:

“I live by the Orlando Airport. Cable has been out since 3. Phone and internet still working. Stopped trying to call Bright House and customer care. How many busy signals can one person take? Thanks for the update!!” – Kathy

“Thanks OS for keeping us better informed then our cable operator!” – Todd

“And THANK YOU ETAN for posting this article and linking to it from your Twitter! Your article was the ONLY PLACE I could find any information!! The phone number’s been busy for hours, the website was super slow (understandably).. Thanks so much!!” – Jen

After all, if your readers aren’t on Twitter, what good is using it? Well, I was wrong.

Wichita, Kansas is not a tech hub. It’s not known for being particularly bleeding edge with technology or Web adoption. It has a median household income of about $40,000, and Kansas is around the national average with regards to the percentage of people over 25 with college degrees.

This doesn’t sound like the greatest test bed for a social networking service, Twitter, that only has a few million users worldwide, who are largely concentrated in wealthy, educated areas in major cities (D.C., New York, San Francisco and the Bay area, London, etc).

Nonetheless, Ron Sylvester, a court reporter for The Wichita Eagle,  has found great success with Twitter. The thing is, his readers don’t have to have Twitter accounts to enjoy his tweeting. All that is required for Sylvester to be successful with Twitter is for him to harness the platform well.

Sylvester uses Twitter to cover court trials live. People love being able to read what is going on and why, especially at major trials. Most of those people will never join Twitter, but that doesn’t stop Twitter from being immensely useful for Sylvester.

One of the keys to harnessing Twitter well for information dissemination is realizing that a Twitter feed can be embedded onto virtually any Web site. People can consume Sylvester’s Twitter feed in a variety of ways:

• People can go to Twitter.com/rsylvester and view his feed. Sylvester does not make the mistake of protecting his feed. He allows anyone to view it. Yes, there are people who follow his beat that are on Twitter, but a lot more people are glued to his Twitter feed even though they don’t have Twitter accounts. During court trials, people love his live tweets.
• On his blog, What the Judge Ate for Breakfast, users can find his Twitter feed embedded on every page. As people navigate around his blog they’ll find a continuously updating stream of news that Sylvester is publishing via Twitter.
• People can subscribe to his Twitter RSS feed. Many, many more people use RSS readers than use Twitter. Beat reporters can just make another subscribe to button with a link to their Twitter RSS feed.
• People can view his Twitter feed when he embeds it into blog posts or onto his newspaper’s Web site. Sylvester can make a blog post that says, “Today I’m covering this trial live. Below you’ll find updates throughout the day from the courtroom.” Sylvester can then embed his feed right into that blog post.

Think about this: Let’s say you’re covering a big event, you have several written pieces about the event, have some video and are posting live updates.

All this information could be placed together in a single blog post (or on a page on your Web site, CMS permitting). The post could link to each written piece, with a description. Video content could be embedded onto the page, and the live Twitter feed could be embedded as well. This way people can grab all your content in one convenient place.

Etan Horowitz, a technology columnist and blogger for the Orlando Sentinel, on the other hand has many readers on Twitter. His beat covers a topic that has a lot of overlap with Twitter, and many of his readers aren’t even in the Orlando area. He often asks questions on Twitter about people’s tech habits, which help him write stories and blog posts.

It’s a different use than Sylvester’s. Both are using Twitter in ways that make sense for their beats. Horowitz can use Twitter to help him find sources and information for his reporting, while Sylvester uses Twitter as a major tool for reporting information.

They are starkly different uses, but both work very well. Horowitz, by the way, also embeds his Twitter feed onto his blog. For Horowitz, this can be a great way for readers to know that he is on Twitter.

Always keep in mind that social networking services like Twitter, delicious, Publish2, YouTube, Viddler, etc usually allow their content to be embedded onto other sites. This makes these tools much more powerful and flexible for journalism. Embedding content allows journalists to have conversations on and off site, while also allowing their content to reach broader audiences.

Even if most of your readers will never understand or use Twitter, you can still effectively use Twitter to help report.

FUD is not always malicious, but it is usually spread by people who are strongly for or against something. For instance, Kent Fischer gets FUD on his blog from people who are against the Dallas Independent School District and vice versa.

FUD can be caused by passing along information that a person believes to be correct, but actually is false. Most often, however, FUD is a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation.

Virtually any Web site or blog that gets enough users will have at least some amount of FUD. The best beat bloggers, however, don’t allow FUD to take hold on their blogs. Those beat bloggers take ownership over the comments and community that forms on their beat blogs.

If one person posts FUD, it’s more than likely that others have the same beliefs. So rather than delete offending posts, many beat bloggers choose to directly respond to those posting FUD to correct them and sometimes admonish them. The SciGuy Eric Berger is very good at dispelling FUD.

Let’s look at a benign example. Recently Berger made a post about how most foreign students who come to America for science and engineering PhDs stick around after they graduate. Here is an an exchange from his blog

One user wrote about why he believes some people being educated in the U.S. are looking to move to other countries:

The trend is reversing because this country is not funding
enough research. Taiwan is. Korea is. China is. Canada is. I will have
exceptional mobility once I have my PhD. I am going to go where the
science is being done. Whether that is a city in the US or Seoul is
largely irrelevant to me. Any modern country with reasonable freedoms
will do. I you want me here, you’d better cough up the money.

Berger responded with:

While some of this might be true, the U.S. still funds about 40 percent of the world’s science R&D.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/2008/RAND_RB9347.pdf

Has the country made some poor choices and has the budget tightening
of the last several years hurt? Unquestionably. But in many (though not
certainly all, such as superconductors) fields your best bet for
cutting edge research is right here.

So, while it may be true that the U.S. has cut down on R&D spending recently, it still spends a lot on R&D compared to the rest of the world. In fact, Berger’s post, Do most Chinese students come here to steal secrets? was an attempt to dispel FUD perpetrated by a U.S. Congressman.:

In any case, this fear was probably most bluntly articulated by U.S. Rep. John Culberson,
whom I heard speak on this issue a few years ago at a science luncheon
in Houston. Many professors from local universities were there. During
a Q&A, the Congressman was asked about the problem with
foreign-born students obtaining visas after 9/11. He responded:

“A concern that I continue to see is that a lot of those
scientists from communist China, my impression is, and correct me if I
am wrong, come here and learn as much as they can, and then leave. And
I’m not really all that much into helping the communists figure out how
to better target their intercontinental ballistic missles at the United
States. They basically steal our technology for military applications.
And they are red China, let’s not forget.”

The answer is a strong no. Berger points out that the five-year stay rate of students from China is 92 percent. That’s higher than India, Taiwan and South Korea. The majority of foreign doctoral students in the sciences come from those four countries.

Berger does not allow disinformation to be spread from his blog. He actively engages his users and takes ownership over the conversation on his blog.

Is it irresponsible for news organizations to allow FUD to go unchallenged? Is this another reason why beat reporters and bloggers need to take responsibility for the comments on their own stories and posts?

Fischer’s blog posts and A1 stories about DISD lowering its standards has caused an outcry among teachers, parents and the general public. It has even begun to garner national attention in such publication as The Wall Street Journal. Clearly, DISD has a public relations nightmare on its hands.

Fischer’s reporting was called into question by another blogger who
said the whole situation was overblown. DISD had begun to disseminate
its spin to bloggers and media outlets.

DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander claimed that what Fischer and The Dallas Morning News had published was in fact a draft copy of the new grading policy. FrontBurner blogger Tim Rogers called on the Morning News to print a clarification, and scolded Fischer and the Morning News for making a big deal out of a draft policy.

Just as Fischer’s blog readers helped break this story open, they also helped slap down district spin. For back story, here is a good primer on the first scoop that Fischer’s blog readers gave him about the school district.

This is where the story gets interesting. Normally, Fischer would have no way to prove that the documents were not drafts but rather finalized documents. Again one of his blog readers stepped up and provided him with critical information:

In case you’d rather not click the link and read it for yourself, I’ll cite the pertinent passage here:

Attached please find the finalized EIA regulation,
powerpoint and parent letters (English and Spanish) that will help to
clarify the regulation grading changes for both parents and teachers.

It was the DISD that first used the term “finalized.” One of Fischer’s readers provided him with the smoking gun. This is the first time Fischer’s readers have acted as a truth squad to dispel FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

Without Fischer’s beat blog, DISD’s new grading policies might have gone unnoticed. Instead, teachers, parents and others were able to see the new policies and have open debate about them on Fischer’s blog.

At first, Fischer didn’t think it was a big story, but he made a blog post about it anyway, asking readers what the impact of the new grading policies would be. His readers — many of which are teachers — knew more about this topic than be did, and he hoped they could shed some light on the situation.

His post prompted a reader to forward him some district documents that laid out how broad the new grading policies would be. The tipster told Fischer this meant new, lower standards. Fischer made a post that linked to the documents:

Color me skeptical, but there are enough loopholes in these rules to drive a grade-inflated truck through. Seriously, given all the second chances, fudge factors and wiggle room these rules enact, wouldn’t it take an act of God for a kid to flunk a class?

He even helped readers out by marking up a district memo (PDF) with a “quick and dirty” translation of some of the key points. He broke down a several hundred word memo into six key points.

A sea of comments formed at the end of his post from teachers who were almost uniformly denouncing the new polices. Those two posts led directly to today’s front page story, “DISD plan to ease grading standards angers teachers:”

Dallas public
school students who flunk tests, blow off homework and miss assignment
deadlines can make up the work without penalty, under new rules that
have angered many teachers.

The story already has more than 100 comments. A new district grading policy might not seem like a big story to an outsider or even a beat reporter, but to the people it affects, it can be a huge story. Fischer’s readers helped him realize the gravity of the situation and were the reason this became a big story in the Dallas area.

“In this instance, the blog really paid off, in that readers tipped us
off to a good story that was still mostly obscured from the public,” Fischer said.

The newsroom did stick to its traditional-media guns in one instance. The print edition would not allow anonymous comments from Fischer’s blog to appear in print. So, Fischer had to “go out and re-report what was already on the blog.”

Since I’m not tied to print conventions and superstitions, I’m going to post some of the gems left in the comments section on Fischer’s blog from teachers.

“This is unbelievable. More proof that our goal is to graduate, not
educate our kids. Are you really going to be ready for college or the
workforce if deadlines don’t matter and you are allowed to retake every
test failed? But wait, we don’t care if you flunk out of college the
first semester, as long as we pushed you through TAKS and gave you a
diploma (no matter how little you did to get it), DISD’s job is done.
If this is the best urban district in the country, we are all in real
trouble.” – Oak Cliff Teacher

“Wow. Congratulations DISD. I had actually considered reapplying to come
back after a year of teaching in the suburbs. Thanks for making the
decision so easy for me. I really feel like a fool for keeping my kids
in your school district. That’s two more high achievers that you will
be losing due to the Road to Broad mediocrity that you are
perpetuating.” – Pineywoods

“What a shock awaits our college ready graduates when they enter that
college classroom and find out that there are no retakes, there is lot
more than an hour’s worth of work outside the class, and deadlines must
be met. But then it will be quite a shock when colleges no longer
accept a DISD transcript.” – Taxedout

Fischer is hoping that these guest bloggers can help keep the conversation going during the slow summer months on his blog. The guest bloggers have gotten off to a strong start so far with some provocative posts.

Can they keep the momentum going? Will readers respond to guest bloggers? Will these guest posts help Fischer’s blog connect more with the community?

Those are the questions I’ll be answering in the coming weeks and months as I monitor this experiment. For now, here are a few observations:

• The guest posts are written from a much more personal perspective. Fischer is an outsider reporting on the district, but his guest bloggers are insiders sharing their personal stories. His inaugural guest bloggers are two long-time veteran teachers of the school district. They should help liven up the blog.
• Some of the topics discussed might not have come up otherwise in Fischer’s reporting. One blog post is from a former DISD employee about how his insurance premiums have gone way down since he got a job in the private sector. This might be a catalyst for an in-depth reporting piece from Fischer. Another post was from a teacher about inadequate technology in classrooms and questionable district recycling practices.
• The guest bloggers are getting comments from people on their blogs. Almost all the comments appear to be from district employees. This probably a reflection of the content. No one has really blogged from a parent perspective yet.