Podcast: Fischer on leaving journalism and lessons learned from beatblogging
Another one of our favorite beatbloggers — and one of the most innovative journalists around — is signing off.
Kent Fischer is leaving journalism at the end of the month. It’s not that Fischer doesn’t enjoy journalism, it’s just that journalism — especially newspapers — are having a tough time supporting journalists. His employer, The Dallas Morning News, just announced another round of layoffs and pay cuts.
Fischer isn’t the first start beatblogger to leave journalism recently. One of our other favorite beatbloggers, Ed Silverman, left newspapers last year. His former employer, The Star-Ledger, may not survive the year.
Fischer wrote me in an email:
The blog has a shitload of fun. It’s what keeps me coming in each morning. It was a blast to learn, and I think I only recently discovered what a good beat reporter and an engaged community can produce. I’m saddened that I won’t be around to push it to the limit.
But the news business no longer provides stability or financial security. If I was young and single and didn’t have two kids under 3 and no mortgage … I’d probably stick around to see how this all ends. But I got all those things and more. So, I’m out, effective April 24.
Fischer wrote on his blog:
This blog has been a career highlight for me. When my editor first approached me with the idea of building an online community around DISD … well, let’s say I was skeptical. You all proved me wrong. I grew to look forward each morning to compiling the Daily Dish, to experimenting with this new form of journalism, to an engaging online conversation. I awaited your comments — Ray’s thoughtfulness, Aloysius’ sharp wit, Cheeto’s grounded-in-reality point of view and all the smart newcomers (like Ann M) that we seem to attract every day.
The DISD Blog revolutionized education reporting in the Dallas area, and Fischer’s readers responded with an outpouring of gratitude when they found out he was leaving. Here are some of those comments:
Posted by donnal @ 10:40 AM Fri, Apr 10, 2009Thank you Kent. Between you and Tawnell, you’ve given a forum for teachers to vent and offer feedback and insight. You’ve definitely informed the public on a daily watch of good things along with the bad that happens in DISD. Most important to me, you helped parents and taxpayers better understand what’s happening in the schools and how our money is spent/misused; however it applies. I know I’ve gained a lot of info and appreciation in a very short time reading this blog.
Good luck with your new job.
You will definitely be missed! This is such a rough time for newspapers that your departure doesn’t really surprise me, but it is a loss. Best wishes to you in your new job, which does sound like an exciting adventure for you. One door closes, another opens!
P.S. Go Red Sox! (1-2 to start the season, eek)
Kent,
I’ve said this privately to you and now I say it publicly too: While I obviously didn’t love everything you did, I respected it and respect you as well. The Dallas Independent School District is better because of your efforts. You helped clean up some areas that needed it. While that wasn’t always comfortable, it was important.
I wish you and your family the very best in the future.
Sincerely,
Jon DahlanderHappy Trails, Kent.
You have spread sunshine all over the place!
Thanks to you, we’ve all learned a lot, sighed a lot, laughed a lot, and screamed a lot. All the best!Tawnell, keep the lights on!
Below you’ll find my final podcast with Fischer, an exit interview of sorts. Fischer discusses what he learned from beatblogging, what went well, what could have gone better, what he would have done if he stuck around longer and more. Fischer also discusses the state of the news industry.
It’s sad to see Fischer go. He did a lot of innovating, which I went over in this post from early today. But he left a lot of nuggets of wisdom in our final talk. Listen to it; it’s worth your time.
Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.
Daily Dose of social media: SEO FTW!
20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress — SEO is massively important on the Web. Many of you run sites and blogs with WordPress. Therefor, you need to read this post. The first plugin on the list, All in One SEO Pack, is a must for any WordPress user. This one blog post could help change the fate of your blog. Read it:
With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.
You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers. Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews
plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.
99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications — Okay, so not every one of these “essential” tools and applications is really relevant to journalists and content producers, but there are some real gems here:
- Tweetlater is a nice little app to schedule tweets in the future. This is great for group Twitter accounts where multiple employees are responsible for providing content. It’s also a nice way to ensure you spread out your tweets. It also allows you to keep your account active while you are away.
- Tweetbeep allows you to keep track of when people mention you, your company or other keywords that you want to track. This is great for journalists who want to be alerted every time certain words are mentioned on Twitter. This is also great for news orgs that want to track what people are saying about them. Yes, Tweetdeck can do the same things, albeit, without the alerts.
- StrawPoll asks different questions for polls each day, which is an interesting way to see what people think on Twitter. For journalists, however, it’s much more helpful to be able to create their own polls. That’s where StrawPoll really shines.
Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft — Internet Explorer has finally become a decent browser. I know most people still use it, but IE7 and IE6 are categorically inferior browsers to Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, etc, etc.
For journalists, the most welcome new feature in IE8 sandboxing. This feature means that individual tabs crash, not the browser itself. This is an extremely useful feature for those of us who have a lot of tabs open at once.
Chrome also features sandboxing, and I expect most browsers will get this feature in the coming years. Essentially, sandboxing makes Web browsers much more similar to modern operating systems, in that they will crash a lot less. Yes, individual applications/tabs will still crash, but that’s a lot better than having your whole computer/Web browser crash.
Sandboxing will make IE users more productive because less time and knowledge will be lost to crashes. IE8 still has some major issues:
IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There’s no default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.
Check out this CNET video to learn more about it:
Podcast: Social media critical to reporting a story
Daniel Victor said social media, and Facebook in particular, were crucial to his ability to gather alumni reaction to the news of a local school being slated to shut down.
Word recently came that the Pennsylvanian government wanted to axe the Scotland School for Veteran’s Children because of budget issues. The school serves at-risk children of veterans, but closing the school would save the state $10.5 million.
Victor’s assignment was to go out in the community and to talk to people about the decision to close the school and also to get in touch with alumni to get their reactions. Normally, this wouldn’t be that easy of a task to do, but thanks to social media, Victor was contacted by dozens of people who wanted to share their stories and reactions.
“It was absolutely critical,” Victor said about using social media to help report this story.
He sent out a tweet and got a few responses on Twitter, but Twitter wasn’t nearly as big of a help as Facebook was. Victor found an alumni group for the school on Facebook and joined the group. He explained what his story was, and he left his cell phone number.
One of the alumni who read his message on Facebook sent out a text message to an alumni network that helped spread the word about Victor was doing. Soon he was contacted by 48 alumni who wanted to be interviewed, and he was able to interview almost two dozen of them.
“They ended up doing the work for me,” he said. “It’s amazing how much of a difference it made for my story. Everybody had a stake in it, and for them to all be in one place, and for me to have access to that, that’s pretty powerful.”
Victor regularly uses social media for crowd sourcing. When news happens, Victor looks to get the news up his paper’s breaking news blog and Twitter ASAP.
“That’s kind of an accepted part of my reporting,” he said about Twitter. “If something is going to be breaking, I’m going to check with my network.”
Because Victor is much more accessible now with social media, he gets a lot more tips. Recently, somebody alerted him to an accident with an EMS responder, where the driver had heart attack. Because of Victor’s online networks, the Patriot-News was able to get that story quicker than they would have otherwise been able to.
“People just kind of know that I’m available to them,” he said.
Recently some bank robbers got loose and were being chased all over the Harrisburg area, Victor said. Roads were being closed, and the story was quickly developing and changing. Victor was able to monitor in real time people’s reaction’s on Twitter.
People were discussing which roads were closed, what the best detours where, analyzing the news and more. The Patriot-News was unable to keep up with Twitter for breaking news, Victor said.
“I kind of equate Twitter to the police scanner, the way that the police scanner kind of gives us this constant monitoring of what is happening in the cop world, he said. “I feel like Twitter is giving us a constant taste of what is happening in community news.”
Some other topics discussed:
- How has your ability to harness social media changed within the last year now that social media is becoming a lot more popular?
- Which beats are best suited for Facebook?
- And more.
