This post sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

At most news organizations, sports and entertainment blogs rule the roost, but at The Sacramento Bee, Jon Ortiz has been able to take a blog about state workers and their issues to the top.

After spending several months at the top, Orti’z beatblog The State Worker, is currently the third most popular blog at the Bee. With football season ramping back up, the Bee’s 49ers blog rose to number one. The Bee’s crime blog rose to number two on the strength of a permanent link from Yahoo!

It’s impressive and rare to see a serious blog like The State Worker consistently one of the top blogs at a major metro newspaper in terms of page views and unique visitors. Ortiz said the 16-month-old blog has resonated with users because engaging users has become a cornerstone of how Ortiz approaches his job.

Many journalists have started blogging, with varying degrees of success. Many of these journalists are approaching blogging like writing newspaper stories. Ortiz said this approach won’t yield much success.

“I think there is a whole generation of journalists struggling with that,” he said. “They want blogs to be moment-to-moment versions of print, and they’re just not.”

Other journalists have taken to adding opinions to their blog posts and writing in a more informal style. But that’s not the key to being a good blogger either. Good blogging is about building community, and engaging users is one of the best ways to do that.

Ortiz said any good blogger has to make himself read his users comments. In the comments, bloggers can find tips, corrections, story ideas and more, all of which can make a journalists job much easier. Ortiz has a regular feature dubbed “blog backs,” where he takes corrections, suggestions and criticims from users and posts them.

“You just really get into the mind of your most arudent users,” Ortiz said about reading comments. “The percentage of commenters to users is less than one percent. Commenters are probably your most passionate users — often the most knowledgeable.”

Ortiz said reading and responding to commenters is a great way to tap into the expertise of your most knowledgeable readers. These most knowledgeable users are the ones who can become future sources for stories and are the people who are pushing bloggers to become better. Ortiz also finds future sources through e-mail and said that responding to user e-mail is an important way to build a blog.

Ortiz has found that people who e-mail him, rather than post comments on his blog, are more likely to use their real names and be willing to go on the record for stories and blog posts (Ortiz writes for both print and the Web). If Ortiz ignored e-mails, he would have lost out on a lot of valuable, on the record sources.

But Ortiz takes e-mails a step further. He often gets thoughtful comments and stories of how new government policies are affecting state workers from users that he shares with his readers. Ortiz said these blog posts that originate as e-mails from users are some of his most popular posts.

Originally Ortiz would ask users if he could use their e-mails on his blog, but now many people e-mail him asking if he’ll consider posting their e-mails. Many of these e-mails share personal stories that help add a lot of color to Ortiz’s blog. This blog post, for instance, contains two e-mails from state workers discussing how furloughs have impacted their lives and abilities to pay their bills.

Users are now even CCing Ortiz on e-mails they send to politicians and government offices. Not only do these e-mails tell stories that Ortiz may not have been able to get otherwise, but they also provide a lot of traffic to his blog without a lot of work. All Ortiz had to do was engage his users, and they began responding back.

Between Ortiz’s beatblog, column and print stories, he reaches quite a few state workers in California. He estimates his beatblog alone reaches a third of state workers. With all those knowledgeable readers, Ortiz would be a fool to ignore their expertise.

“It’s me and nearly half of a million of them,” he said. “I would be a fool to think that I could ever surpass the knowledge of that collective audience. It’s just not going to happen. I can either embrace that realization and try to leverage my points of contact or I can just try to continue telling people what they generally already know, that’s not very helpful.”

If Ortiz’s users are so knowledgeable, why do they even need him or his blog? Because The State Worker has such a big reach with state workers, Ortiz can get the governor and government to answer questions, whereas most of Ortiz’s readers can’t. And because Ortiz gets those answers, he has built a very loyal following.

When Ortiz pitched the idea for this blog to editors, he said he wanted to change how the Bee covered state workers. Instead of just writing down what the governor said at a press conference or doing a write up of a new law or policy, Ortiz would report on new laws, for instance, while also sharing the stories of how these laws and polices affect state workers. The only way to really do that well was to actively engage with state workers, and that’s what Ortiz has done.

An expanded network allows for more tips and more chances for crowd sourcing. But people are much more likely to help journalists with their reporting if journalists provide a tangible service to them. Many of our beat bloggers have given users an unprecedented level of coverage and also helped provide their users with a service.

For instance, Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs alerted Dallas school teachers to career fares and job openings after many of them were laid off due to an unexpected budget crisis. They’ve built good will with many of their readers.

Our lead nominee this week provides quality journalism and a service to his readers.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post

• Krebs helps his readers out, and you know what, they help him out. Journalists who want to use social media and Web tools in a very one-way, me-focused manner will find limited success. 
• Krebs was nominated for his post encouraging users to update Java on their computers because cyber criminals have a history of targeting Java vulnerabilities. This post reminds readers of the importance of updating Java on their PCs. Krebs also links to a tool that will let users know if they have the latest version of Java.
• In addition, Krebs links to a free tool from Secunia that helps Windows users stay up-to-date on all their software. While reporting on Java vulnerabilities and patches is his beat, Krebs doesn’t have to go out of his way to make sure people are as secure as possible on their PCs.
• The usefullness of Krebs’ blog, however, just begins with his blog posts. One user asked for examples of when cyber criminals attacked Java, and Krebs provided three examples. Other users were having trouble with Adobe Flash and Secunia. Krebs offered solutions to those problems as well. 
• If you want users to help you do your job better (by expanding your network of useful sources) than it makes sense to help users out. Krebs follows this principle. 

Tawnell Hobbs | The Dallas Morning News

• Hobbs puts a tough question up to her readers. “Should Dallas teachers who missed out on receiving federal grant money because their principals failed to follow rules receive the cash from DISD?”
• This question becomes tough to answer because the Dallas Independent School District has been facing a financial crisis for months. Yet, many teachers missed out on federal funds ranging from $1,000-10,000 per teacher just because some principals failed to follow federal rules properly. Some of the teachers who qualified recently lost their jobs because of a reduction in force due to the budget crisis. DISD trustees are split on what to do.
• What better way to judge opinion than to ask your readers? Hobbs can use the comments she gets from readers (most of which are a part of DISD or former, laid-off colleagues) as a launching pad to a follow up story on opinion. Her blog is also a great place for public debate.
• In addition, the blog has been a great tool for Hobbs and her partner, Kent Fischer, to get tips from DISD employees. 

Jon Ortiz | The Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz wins this award again for his fantastic Blog Back feature. It’s a feature that every beat blogger should seriously consider adopting ASAP.
• Let’s look at the benefits of this feature. It doesn’t take a lot of time to produce, it’s a popular feature with users that elicits comments and it generates a sizable traffic boost to old content that is linked to. Plus, it recognizes strong reader comments and encourages more. Many journalists complain that allowing user comments is a mistake because most of them are banal or hateful or whatever. But when a beat reporter acknowledges strong comments, it encourages every commentator to rise his game. 
• Also, journalists who read and respond to users tend to get much better comments on their blogs in the first place. It’s all about taking responsibility for your community. Either you’re a community builder or a destroyer. These three Leaderboard recipients are community builders.

It’s similar to hoisting comments, but it’s more in depth than that. Both features are ultimately about community building and help foment better and more sensible comments from users.

Blog backs are a combination of hoisting strong comments from users, and of clarifying of points of fact that people didn’t understand in posts from bloggers.

“People really need some amplification on points that we were making in the blog,” Ortiz said about starting the feature. “We also have some people who put some time and effort into their comments and we want to recognize those.”

This new feature doesn’t take long to create. His first week it took him about two hours, but he has streamlined the process since then. In his third week he was able to put this feature together in 20 minutes.

“Instead of waiting until the end of the week to review the comments and the blog entries, as the week went along I took would take note of comments that I thought were particularly blog back worthy,” he said. “I got everything done ahead of time as the week went along. It’s pretty much then just a matter of pasting that into Moveable Type.”

A post that takes Ortiz 20 minutes to create significantly increased traffic to his blog. Not only do the blog back posts themselves get a lot of page views, but the old posts that are linked to in the blog back see on average of about a 10 percent boost in traffic.

“The hit counts to the page are very high and I think it gives people a way to quickly look back and see what they’ve missed,” he said about his new feature.

Some other topics discussed:

• Have other newsroom bloggers adopted this feature?
• Are there certain kinds of blogs this feature makes more sense for? Do some blogs not work with this?
• Why should other bloggers look into doing blog backs?

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

You’ll see some familiar faces and a new one. All three are beat bloggers worth flowingly on a daily basis. They have so many lessons to teach us all. 

We tackle cultivating communities and the wisdom of the crowd this week. Keep sending those nominees in!

Jon Ortiz | Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz recently launched a cool new feature, “blog backs.” It’s a great feature to spur better communication and conversations with users.
• This is how Ortiz describes blog backs: “review your thoughtful and provocative online comments, amplify points, answer questions, correct our mistakes and humbly accept your warranted criticism.”
• He takes good comments from users, elevates them and then responds to them. He also links back to the original post that spurred each comment. 
• This feature is a bit like hoisting comments. But the added twist of responding to and clarifying users comments makes this a much richer feature.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post