Leaderboard for week of 7-21-2009: Dave Levinthal memorial edition

We’re sad to see another outstanding beatblogger leaving the industry.

It’s been a rough for years for journalism, and many of the top beatbloggers we have been following have left the industry. People like Kent Fischer and Ed Silverman helped pioneer the practice of beatblogging, but now they have moved on to new, non-journalism careers. Our first leaderboard member this week, Dave Levinthal, was inspired by Kent Fischer and modeled his beatblog after his.

But Levinthal like his inspiration has left journalism.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• Another great beatblogger, political reporter Dave Levinthal, is leaving newspapers. Thankfully Levinthal will remain in a role as a government watchdog. He is moving on to OpenSecrets.Org as their new communications director.
• From the press release of Levinthal’s hiring, “Through its award-winning, publicly accessible Web site, www.OpenSecrets.org, CRP examines the influence of money on elections and public policy, especially in the U.S. Congress. Levinthal will oversee the center’s original journalism and blogging, and serve as its spokesman to the news media and other organizations that rely on CRP’s research and analysis.”
• I can’t think of anyone else that I would want overseeing online journalism and blogging at a politically-oriented organization than Levinthal. He is one of the best modern political reporters. He combines strong journalism skills with new media skills and should fit in well at OpenSecrets.Org. We’ll have more later this week on Levinthal’s new gig.
• Our previous content on Levinthal: 1) Podcast: Levinthal on starting a beat blog to meet users’ needs, 2) Levinthal shows how link journalism is done, 3) Levinthal makes leaderboard for his innovative coverage of a local election and 4) Levinthal made the leaderboard for hoisting comments.

Jon Ortiz | Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz is taking his link journalism to the next level by incorporating Publish2 into his work flow. This will allow his users to submit their own links to interesting content from around the Web. Together, their link journalism should be very good.
• Ortiz started a Publish2 group for news from around the Web related to state workers.  The beauty of a Publish2 group is that Ortiz can allow users of his blog, state workers and other knowledgeable people into his group. Publish2 has a verification process that keeps marketers and spammers out, and that’s a big reason why we like Publis2 for link journalism, as opposed to sites like Delicious. Ortiz can hand select who he wants to let into his Publish2 group, which should help him get the most out of his link journalism efforts.
• One of the things that Ortiz is doing with his link journalism is linking to state worker-related news that isn’t just about Californian state workers. This will allow Ortiz to showcase state workers issue from around the country and compare those to issues facing state workers in California. Ortiz is one of the best reporters on state government in California, but the only way he could tell the larger story of state employees across the country is by linking to the best.
  

Stimulus Spot Check | ProPublica

• ProPublic was nominated by Ryan Sholin, who said this about the Stimulus Spot Check project, “I’m moderately fascinated by ProPublica’s crowdsourcing process (and platform) for listing, assigning, and gathering information on local stimulus projects.”
• The stimulus is a massive bill with billions of dollars being spent all over the country. Crowdsourcing is the most logical way to track how stimulus spending is going. ProPublica’s Stimulus Spot Check is an interesting case study into how effective crowdsourcing can be. Perhaps more importantly, this project is a great case study into how to build and manage large-scale crowdsourcing efforts.
  
• ProPublica is looking for users to “help us figure out the status of these projects — whether the project has been started or has been completed, what company got the contract, and how many jobs the company says it retained or created for its stimulus contract. Everyone who contributes will be credited in our story.”
• The project is very young and there aren’t many results yet, but this is a massive crowdsourcing project worth keeping an eye on. As resources continue to be cut at traditional news organizations, harnessing the wisdom and time of the crowd will continue to be more and more important.

Leaderboard for week of 5-11-2009: No blog required edition

This week’s Leaderboard features three distinct examples of innovation in beat reporting, because there is no one way to innovate when it comes to reporting.

Our first nominee shows that beat reporters don’t need a blog to be social and interact with people. The comments after news stories provide an excellent place for two-way communication and conversations to happen. While the other two nominees spur conversations through beatblogs, the first nominee is bringing two-way communication to his stories.

It’s important to note that there is no one way to go about beatblogging. Beatblogging can happen on a social network like Twitter or on a blog or in the comments after a news story. The keys to beatblogging are two-way communication, accessibility and transparency.

Robert Schoenberger | The Plain Dealer

• First I need to make it clear that this is a newspaper story, not a blog post. Reporters don’t need a blog to engage in two-way communication. The comments section after their stories will do just fine.
• Schoenberger wrote a story about UAW rallies in downtown Cleveland, where workers called on Washington to protect GM and Chrysler plants in the area. The story drew heated comments on both sides, because of the contentious nature of this issue. Many commenters don’t believe the auto industry should be singled out for a bailout, while other industries sink.
• The Plain Dealer recently called on reporters to interact more, and this story shows why interaction can help make a better product. Schoenberger enters the comments and provides additional facts and figures. His presence helped make the comments less volatile, despite this being a topic with passionate people on both sides. Most of all, however, he helped make better journalism by directly responding to claims made by commenters.
• Some commenters brought up how many foreign cars are actually made in the U.S., including some made in Ohio. Schoenberger stepped in to provide some exact figures, “So far this year, Toyota has imported from Japan about 41 percent of the cars it sells here. Honda imported about 19 percent of its cars (Nissan’s been at about the 20 percent import range for years, but it doesn’t break down its numbers as cleanly).”
• To another commenter, Schoenberger explained why resale values of Big 3 automakers are lowers, “For years, Ford, GM and Chrysler produced more vehicles than they could profitably sell, and they dumped the rest on the rental fleet market. So, 6-18 months after the rental companies got those cheap cars, they would dump them on the used market. That created a huge supply of slightly used Big Three cars, and as an economist can tell you, when supply goes up, prices go down. Honda especially has protected its resale prices by keeping production in line with demand. That’s why their resale values are better than Toyota’s. On the Big Three side, the companies slashed fleet sales about two years ago, and their residual values are climbing. But it’s going to take years (and an improvement in car sales) to undo the damage.”
• When you look at this story, and the subsequent comments, you can see how the comments really forwarded the debate along and created a story of its own. The main story itself was about a few small rallies in the Cleveland area. That’s not exactly big news or something that would usually drive a lot of traffic. However, Schoenberger and commenters turned this story into a a larger debate about domestic automakers. That’s really where this story got interesting, and Schoenberger did a big service to PD readers by weighing in with additional facts and figures.

Andrew C. Revkin | The New York Times

• This is an excellent example of using a blog to tie multiple pieces of content together into a package. In one blog post Revkin links to and embeds content from nytimes.com, NYT blogs, YouTube, books.google.com and Times Topic pages. He takes this disparate content and combines it together to make a post about what happens to garbage and how waste effects rich and poor countries and people differently.
• This post itself doesn’t include original reporting, but it does two things: It gets people thinking of these desperate pieces of content — many from the Times itself — as a package of like-minded stories, and it gets a conversation going about the subject. Blogs excel at conversation and seemingly simple posts like this can be great conversations starters — and traffic creators.
• The other thing this post does is bring attention to older content that is still relevant. Not all this content was created the same day, but it was all relevant at the time of the post. Revkin wrote a nice post that tied all the content together and explained why people should care. In doing so, he brought new life to some older NYT content.
• All the content Revkin linked to told a smaller story, but placed together, it tells a much larger and complete story.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• Levinthal gets a nod this week not for a singular action, but for his complete coverage of the recent local elections in Dallas.
• As the election day went on, Levinthal began filling reports on the voter turnout, early vote returns, analysis of how the big vote was going on the Dallas Convention Center hotel proposition, live reports from the Vote No Dallas! party and the results of the big vote. Levinthal also had a post on why he believes Major Tom Leppert was able to win the proposition 1 vote.
• Levithal followed up this terrific election day coverage with a live chat a day later to discuss the election results and what they mean. Levinthal showed how local elections can be covered with new depth and fervor with a good beatblog. Not only did he provide great covering as events broke, but he also provided strong analysis. This combination of news and analysis is hard to beat. This is the kind of coverage that shows how journalism can be better on the Web.

Leaderboard for week of 3-30-09: Sports reporter edition

We have honored sports beatbloggers in the past, but we thought it was high time that we found some more innovative sports beat reporters.

Sports reporting (especially at the pro or major college level) does not lend itself well to beatblogging, but we have found some beat reporters who are innovating and utilizing new tools. Yes, the best beatbloggers typically come from news beats, but there are some sports reporters who have lessons to share.

Derrick Goold | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• Beatblogging, social media and other Web tools don’t lend themselves that well to sports reporting, especially at the professional level, but Goold has found ways to be innovative with these new tools and connect with users better than ever before. Goold covers the St. Louis Cardinals for the Post-Dispatch and is very active on his blog and social media.
• Goold leaves little tidbits in his Twitter feed before games. Here is one example: “Cardinals currently in clubhouse watching a MLB steroid-related video.” That’s the kind of nugget of information that would never make it into a story for the paper and probably wouldn’t even make it into a blog post. Goold’s Twitter feed is filled with tidbits like that. He also interacts with users via Twitter.
  
• Goold also has a Facebook page for himself and his blog. What I really like about his use of Facebook is how he gives users the chance to start discussions about the Cardinals or baseball and Goold participates in those discussions. Whereas Goold leads the discussion on his blog, users get to lead the discussion on Facebook.
• The nature of being a beat reporter that covers a professional sports team doesn’t lead well to beatblogging, but Goold has done a very good job of innovating and engaging his users.

James Walker | ESPN.com

• ESPN has done a really nice job of adding on bloggers to its staff, and these bloggers operate in a much different fashion than their on-air personalities and standard reporters. Walker is a former beat reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, but now has a beatblog focused on the AFC North in the NFL for ESPN.com.
• Walker engages users in a myriad of ways. He has a weekly chat where users can submit questions, and he selects the best ones to answer. This is a great way for users to be able to tap into his deep knowledge of the AFC North, and it’s an opportunity for users to ask questions that may not have been answered by reporters. This is also an opportunity to clarify some of the confusing things around professional sports (for instance, the cap hit of trading an NFL player).
• He also has a mailbag feature where users can send in questions about their respective teams. He does a mailbag at least a few times a week.
• Walker also engages in daily link journalism. He finds the most interesting story of the day for each of the four teams in the AFC North.

Dave Levinthal | Dallas City Hall Blog

• Yes, we have nominated people in the past for hoisting comments, but we’re going to keep doing it until every beatblogger starts doing this. The Dallas City Hall Blog just started hoisting comments by creating a new weekly feature.
• If you want people to leave thoughtful comments, you have to give them some sort of incentive. Being active in the comments and having the opportunity to interact with a beatblogger is one form of incentive. Another great incentive is highlighting the best comments of the week. People will leave better comments if A) they know you are reading them B) they know you’ll responsed and interact with them and C) they know if they leave something really insightful that you’ll acknowledge what they have to say.
• Levinthal said this is why they are starting this new feature: “Because, at the end of the day, we want the Dallas City Hall Blog’s comments section to be more than a repository for throwaway thoughts, bland retorts, or worse, a shouting match. Sometimes, it’s any or all of those things. Instead, we hope our blog reporting will more often than not foster thoughtful conversation and spirited, yet respectful debate on any of the hundreds of issues that face Dallas city government. Therefore, starting this Friday and continuing each Friday thereafter, we’ll select at least one reader comment from the week, highlight it and discuss it. So fire up your intellect. And while we can’t promise you a golden cow if your comment is selected — already in use — we’ll come up with something fun.”

Leaderboard for week of 3-16-2009: Three pillars of new media journalism

This week’s Leaderboard is a potpourri of different skills and examples.

That’s just the way I like it. We have strong link journalism, strong live blogging and strong community building. Each of those are important to journalism moving forward.

I apologize for the tardiness of the Leaderboard this week. We’ve been taking on a lot of new endeavors at BeatBlogging.Org and bringing students up to speed on the project.

David Brauer | MinnPost.com

• Brauer was nominated for this nifty bit of link-journalism. Curation is a big part of the future of journalism. Even if you’re not breaking every story, you can still act as a trusted source and filter for users.
• There is too much information to read on the Internet. It’s overwhelming at times. That’s what makes link journalism so powerful. Brauer combines great original reporting, with strong curation. His users get the best of his original work, plus the best work from around the Web.
• MinnPost.com is a non-profit journalism outfit that you should be following. They are experimenting with some interesting revenue models.
• Braublog is a kickass beatblog by them that covers local media and politics, and it’s a piece of new media journalism worth keeping tabs on.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• This week features more CoveritLive goodness from a beatblogger. Levinthal used the live blogging tool to live blog / live chat during a contentious debate about a proposed Dallas Convention Center hotel. The debate featured Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and real estate executive Anne Raymond.
• This is a particularly strong example of live blogging. Before the debate started, Levinthal answered questions that were e-mailed to him about the proposed project. He also took questions from people on CoveritLive before the debate started.
• His analysis and links before the debate started helped give users background and answered many of their questions. They were then better able to understand what was happening during the debate.
• Live blogging is a tool that can benefit just about any beatblogger, and CoveritLive is one of the premier live blogging tools. Live blogging gives journalists, particularly print journalists a new ability to immediately inform users and connect with them during live events. A debate like this is an excellent example of when a live blog makes a lot of sense. This is one of the best examples we have ever seen of live blogging.

Monica Guzman | Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• This is an honorary nod to Guzman because her role at the new P-I will be changing. The Big Blog has existed as a conversations starter, linking heavily to the P-I’s content and great content from around the Web. Guzman has also pulled out interesting comments on other P-I stories and elevated them to their own posts. But the thing is, the P-I is radically changing. Most of the newsroom is gone, and so Guzman’s role will be changing.
• The Big Blog was an exemplary example of how a newspaper could use the Web for two-way communication and community building. Guzman engaged in gathering, moderating and analyzing conversations. That was the heart of what she did. Most news organization do not have someone like her on board. They need to fix that.
• The Big Blog was also a blog that worked well with traditional print content. This is the style of blog that every newspaper should look into. You can find our past coverage of the old Big Blog here.
• Now that the P-I no longer has print content, it’s clear that The Big Blog will be changing. What the new Big Blog and P-I will be like is still to be determined. Regardless of what the new Big Blog looks like, the old Big Blog was a beatblog worth emulating by other news organizations.

Leaderboard for week of 2-2-09: Curation edition

This week’s Leaderboard is all about curation.

Yes, the Internet makes information more accessible and has destroyed much of the gatekeeping role that journalists have played in the past, but it also has overloaded people with information. There is just so much information on the Internet that it can be hard to make sense of it all. That’s where journalists can come in.

On the Web, journalists can provide value by acting as curators. Journalists can sift through the mountains of information on a given topic, find the best parts, highlight keywords, link to important documents and help people make sense of it all. Beat reporters in particular have deep knowledge of topics and can harness that knowledge to be strong curators.

The link is a powerful thing. It is the basis of good curation on the Web. This week’s Leaderboard is comprised of journalists who act as curators for people.

They help their users make sense of it all.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• This is another great beat blog from The Dallas Morning News. Levinthal was inspired by Tawnell Hobbs and Kent Fischer’s popular beat blog. Levinthal has used beat blogging to improve his beat reporting and to connect better with users.
• This is an interesting bit of link journalism. Instead of linking to other news stories, Levinthal mostly links to government documents about the Dallas City Hall. It’s a great way to provide curation of government documents. Journalists can sift through documents, finding and linking to important ones. Journalists can also help make sense of individual documents.
• Many documents, including government documents, are publicly available. Journalists, however, can provide value for users by curating and making sense of all those documents and information.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

• Fischer originally blogged about a new Texas senate bill that would require school districts to make public the name of candidates during superintendent searches. He then posted about an exchange that he believes shows why the superintendent search process could use some openness.
• Fischer then highlighted keywords and phrases in the exchange that would be of interest to his users. The phrases he highlighted demonstrated a lack of openness that the Senate bill is meant to address. This is another act of curation. Fischer is able to read longer documents and explain them to users in much easier and digestible terms.
• Fischer and Hobbs have done a great job of getting people talking on their blog. These users often offer incredible insight into the district (many work for it), and they often provide links that can help Fischer and Hobbs report and help other users understand issues surrounding the school district better.

Daniel Bassill | Tutor Mentor Connection

• This post clearly demonstrates the power of linking, and it showcases how asinine it is when journalists don’t link out. If a journalist mentions an article, blog post, photo, video, etc that is on the Internet, it is paramount that he or she links or embeds said content.
• This post takes linking a bit further. It’s not just about linking to content that is mentioned within the blog post, but it’s also about fashioning a blog post around linking.
• In this blog post, Bassil links to articles, Web sites, books and other relevant information on the topic of school reform in Chicago. The value of this post is not only in the original content that Bassil produced but also the quality content that he links to and suggests that others read.
• Bassil knows the issue of school reform well, and he can act as a curator for the topic by sending people to the best content available on the topic.

Podcast: Levinthal on starting a beat blog to meet users’ needs

Dave Levinthal and his colleague Rudolph Bush started The Dallas City Hall Blog after seeing the success of blogs like the Dallas Independent School District Blog and various political blogs on the Internet.

“We saw that and saw the benefits of them having a blog, and wanted to go ahead and do it ourselves,” Levinthal said.

But there was another reason for starting it too.

“We have a need for this,” Levinthal said.

There was news not being reported because of a lack of a dedicated online presence for the city hall beat, while other news was simply not being reported in a timely manner. 

“[We started the blog] to give ourselves a medium where we could grab in all those snippets of news that fell to the floor,” he said. “Those are little inside baseball nuggets, those are the sort of light hardhearted side of politics, breaking news that often would have to wait until the next day or be buried somewhere else on the Web site.”

Now Levinthal and Bush can even beat their broadcast counterparts to the punch with their beat blog and live blogging efforts. Before the beat blog was established, Levinthal worried if a news item would show up on the 6:00 or 10:00 news, before The Dallas Morning News came out the next day. Levinthal never worries about that anymore. 

Levinthal and Bush have also benefited from going niche on the Web. Before they had their own blog, they used to post to a general news blog for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That may have been okay for the occasional breaking news item, but it wasn’t a good way to cultivate a beat online.

The Dallas City Hall Blog is a haven for political and government news junkies. It’s the place to go for both in-depth features and up-to-the-second tidbits. 

“You can talk about the decline of circulation for newspapers all you want, but I think the fact of the matter is … that more people are reading about Dallas city news and Dallas political news than they ever have been,” he said.

Before the beat blog, Levinthal relied on a much smaller group of sources. These were proactive sources that would contact him when they wanted to get something out. Levinthal also had to work the phones a lot, trying to find information.

“The fact of the matter is, most people are not going to take the time or want to make the effort to pick up the phone and call you, unless they are a regular, trusted source of yours,” he said. “Now people who may care about a specific esoteric issue … they have no qualms about firing an e-mail off to you saying, ‘hey I have information about this, that or the other thing.’ All the sudden you’re a conduit for information and tips. Some of our better stories this year have come from that kind of interaction.”

Levinthal has had stories that he originally imagined would be blog only published in the print edition. He did a blog post critiquing and rating each Dallas city council members Web site and digital presence. The Web sites ranged from very basic with an about page and some contact information to very elaborate with information on online contributions, blogs, video, audio, etc.

Levinthal gave each council member a letter grade and tried to see who had the best digital presence. It was a fun little feature.

“Editors at the paper ended up really taking a liking to it,” he said. “We ended up doing a whole big spread in print. That’s one example where the blog is driving the print product, as opposed to the print product driving the blog.”

Why should a beat reporting start a beat blog? Levinthal thinks its a necessity in this day and age. 

“It gives you the opportunity to get more depth, more breadth and, again, more immediacy to the news that you’re writing,” he said. “Frankly, although that’s more work for us and you find yourself up at all hours updating the blog and what not, it has really helped our beat reporting, and I think we simply do a better job of covering our beat.”

Some other topics discussed:

• How does a beat blog change print reporting? Is it a major paradigm shift in how you do journalism?
• How to build a relationship with a blog user to make them into a trusted source.
• How have your editors reacted to the blog?
• What is the future of the Dallas City Hall Blog? What does the next year hold?

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