Leaderboard No. 1: week of 10-20-08

Welcome to the inaugural Leaderboard. Each week we highlight the most innovative beat reporters. The leaderboard changes weekly, and we’ll have new nominees up on our homepage starting today. Continue sending in your nominees.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

Why?

• Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs (both work on the DISD blog) have taken their beat blog to another level ever since a budget crisis broke out on Sep. 10. 
• The DISD blog’s traffic has spiked through the roof since this crisis broke out, largely due to the incredible coverage that Fischer and Hobbs have done. 
• Fischer was put on the leaderboard this week in particular because of his coverage of recent layoffs. Before layoffs occurred, he got a hold of a list that had all of the cuts at each school. He redacted the names from the list, but it was still a powerful tool for people to see which schools would be hardest hit by the layoffs. 
• What really took Fischer’s coverage over the top was not only his ability to report hard numbers before anyone else, but also his ability to provide people with a voice. His open letter to those laid off or affected by the layoffs received a lot of powerful and heartbreaking responses. On October 16th alone, the DISD blog received 343 comments, and that was with the blog software being down for about three hours.

Beat blogging lessons from Fischer:

• Beat blogging allows reporters to concentrate on core reporting
• Guest blogging from community members
• Audio interview with Kent Fischer about building a blog on steroids
• Kent Fischer debuts new feature to hoist user comments
• Blog readers lead to A1 story for Dallas Morning News
• Interview with Kent Fischer about his readers helping him uncover a major story

Eric Berger | Houston Chronicle

Why?

• Berger has long been one of the most innovative beat reporters. He is a master of user engagement. 
• Recently he asked his readers to be his assignment editor and to tell him if there were any stories they would like him to cover. Berger got a lot of responses, and he took the best ideas and put them to a vote on his blog.
• Berger’s latest efforts haven’t required a lot of time on his part but have resulted in a lot of user interaction and engagement. His readers are actively debating which topic makes the most sense for Berger to tackle and why. People are even giving Berger tips for how to cover each story. For instance, “Also, since solar arrays are typically installed atop buildings, spread across vacant fields or built as parking lot shade structures, it might be useful to explore the maintenance requirements/costs that will be incurred to actually collect energy for many years beyond that needed to replay the initial investment.” Yes, Berger’s readers add a lot to his blog, and that’s because Berger actively encourages participation. 

Interview with Zac Echola about comment moderation

Forum Communications Zac Echola said the only way to deal with comments is to get your hands dirty.

By that he means you have to interact with the public, but that doesn’t necessarily mean spending large amounts of time on comment moderation. I’ve found by interviewing different people that beat reporters and bloggers who interact with users tend to keep things cleaner and more on topic.

Forum Communications allows it individual papers to decide how they want to handle comments. Some are very hands on with moderation, while others are more hands off. Echola believes you have to pick a method and stick with it. He has noticed some publishers and editors spend a lot of time nitpicking over which comments to approve.

“Comments are one of those things that if you want to, you can let them take up a lot of your time,” he said. “Personally, while I think we should engage and should work in some sort of way, discussing things with people on comment boards, I don’t necessarily think it has to be this thing that has to be constantly monitored and constantly watched.”

That’s an interesting take on comment moderation. A lot of newspapers choose to go the other route, spending a lot of time on moderation but very little time on reader interaction. While the latter method may keep comments PG, it won’t help foment strong conversations.

Echola has some tips for spotting suspect comments quickly and easily. Comments that are in all caps or are all lowercase are often written by trolls or are probably a personal attack. Really long and really short posts also are a red flag for Echola.

Echola discusses these points and much more.

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

Dispelling FUD on news Web sites and blogs

Easily one of the biggest negatives of comments on blogs and Web sites is the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that is spouted off by users that is intended to confuse or deceive fellow users.

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?

Audio interview with Eric Berger on building an online community

Eric Berger, the SciGuy over at the Houston Chronicle, has had success building a blog with a strong community around it.

Building a community requires hard work and dedication. It takes a blogger who embraces two-way communication. Just writing print stories online won’t build a community, but it doesn’t take crazy ideas to get people interacting on a blog.

“Simple things like ending a post with a question,” Berger said. “Once you get people commenting, they feel compelled to come back.”

Building a community involves a lot of reader interaction. Berger gets a lot of reader comments on his blog, and he moderates the blog himself. Plus, Berger tries to respond as much as possible to comments on his blog.

Moderating comments can take a lot of time, especially with contentious issues like global warming, intelligent design and others.

“It does take time to moderate, but it makes for a much better community,” Berger said.

His paper has unmoderated comments on stories and the discussion and community isn’t the same. Often the comments on stories quickly devolve into banal arguments. Berger believes interacting with users keeps the discussion more on topic and less inflammatory.

“If people know that someone is going to read what they’re writing and perhaps judge them, they’ll be more careful with what they write,” Berger said. “It’s good in the sense that people recognize that there is going to be a presence of someone in there.”

What hasn’t worked for Berger: podcasting and video. He could do 3-4 blog entries in the same time he could do one video, and more people would look at the blog posts. Podcasting was a lot of effort for a few hundred people to listen to.

His blog, on the other hand, usually generates 100,000+ page views a month.

Berger also gives advice on why you should blog.

“It really does improve your reporting of the beat,” Berger said.

But he cautions that if you don’t want to blog and build a community, you won’t be successful. Building a community takes time and effort. You have to want to do it.

Check out the full interview for Berger’s thoughts on building an online community around a beat.

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