Creating the perfect beatblog

A cutting edge beatblog, and the sites of highest interest to Beatblogging.org, are those using the two-way, social part of the Web, to cover a beat in a networked or user-assisted way.

Here we find information and newsy items, advice and ideas regularly flowing in from readers as the blog becomes a platform for extending the network of the beat outward until hundreds and thousands of people are helping to… cover the beat.

But — truth be told — there aren’t any beatblogs that get it all right. Mostly, this is due to lack of time and resources. Where one blogger spends time on original content, another blogger spends time on two-way communication with readers/commenters.

So, let’s say that it were possible to create the perfect beatblog; that time and resources aren’t an issue. And let’s say that we created this blog using only elements from existing blogs. In other words, a mash-up.

What would this blog look like?

The Creators

First of all, it’s important to note that a beatblog does not have to be run by a large media company. It can be created by a single person or a team, a pro or an amateur journalist. The idea is that the creator(s) whoever he/she/they are, are people who care deeply about regularly covering a beat and focusing on content that is not only valuable to their readers who are interested in the niche topic, but also focus on content that their readers suggest be written or covered.

In other words, the creators “get it” — all of it. From the look and feel of their blog, to its subject to their linking ethics and social media leverage — they focus on truly becoming a “beatblog” and not just a blog that “happens to have a beat.”

They would have the reporting drive of Kent Fischer, the networking savviness of Monica Guzman, the friendly, open-mindedness of Brian Stelter and the entrepreneurial spirit of Daniel Victor.

The Design

It must be stressed that design goes a long way online. As much as “Content is King,” design can really change the way readers approach your blog and interact with it.

A beatblog that really hit the nail on the head in terms of theme and design is GothamSchools. It’s a blog focused on breaking news and analysis of the NYC public schools. If you take a look at the site, you’ll find that it’s header is properly tied in with the subject — it has the New York City skyline and the image of a public school.

The rest of the page is very minimalist and straightforward, designed to look like the pages of a notebook. What is great about GothamSchools is that there is no way anyone can get lost or confused with where to find more information, how to contact the creators or what the site is about. Everything is neatly organized and tagged, exactly the way beatblogs should be.

I’ve stressed before that many beat blogs fail to provide enough transparency and contact information on their pages. This is because so many of the best beatbloggers are attached to legacy news organizations, and thus, their pages are not stand-alone sites but rather limbs of the main news site.

I think the proper way to run a beatblog is to make it it’s own Web site, with it’s own contact information and “about” page. It shouldn’t just be a link from a drop-down menu on a news organization. Of course, if it’s affiliated it should have the proper attributions and links, etc.

But making the beatblog it’s own page can make it more comfortable for readers, easier to find and easier to interact with. Just as a news site’s Twitter feed or Facebook page is separate from the organization and more personalized, so should a beatblog be.

The Strategy/Execution

Properly running a beatblog can be difficult if there are time constraints or not enough helping hands. For example, Pharmalot, a beatblog run by journalist Ed Silverman about the pharmaceutical industry, featured really good daily journalism and link journalism. It was a beatblog that doggedly covered its niche.

But it would have been much stronger if had the same community building as the DISD Blog. Pharmalot might have been the best beatblog from just a pure content perspectiveve, but it always lagged in the two-way communication department. Silverman spent so much time delivering incredible content by himself that he simply couldn’t do more two-way communication.

Then you take Alexander Russo’s District 299 blog, and it has great two-way communication but could be stronger in terms of original content.

Again, if time weren’t an issue, what would the proper mash-up look like?

1. Clear beat: GothamSchools
2. High volume of commentary: SciGuy
3. Harvesting of comments “Here’s what you said about this…”: Come Heller High Water
4. Inquiries/questions asked to readers: Security Fix
5. Daily roundup: The Daily Wrap
6. Filtering and linking: Today in the Sky
7. Comments or e-mails from readers run as posts/used for story ideas/improve stories: Central PA NewsVote
8. Comments hosted in blog entries: Inside Ed
9. Reader blogs: Seattle PI
10. Hoisting Comments: Dallas ISD Blog
11. Live blogging: The Caucus
12. Frequent blog posts by author, i.e. several per day, updates: Glenn Greenwald
13. Contact info/Transparency/Accessibility/Brand identity: Security Fix
14. Good use of Twitter: Alex Roarty of PoliticsPA
15. Quality writing/grammar/style: Slate.com

The Results

In the end, it’s all a time and money game. There’s not enough of either. And that’s okay — for now.

Beatblogs are still in their infancy, and it’s going to take time to evolve into something powerful and profitable. It’s always important, however, to keep fresh ideas in mind and constantly try to break the mold.

Be creative. Think outside the box. Learn from the best.

Run the best damn beatblog that the Internet’s ever seen.

EWA: Social media for better education reporting

Below you’ll find a post I created to go with a beatblogging presentation at the Education Writers Association conference.

For a more in-depth quick start guide on what beatblogging is, how to do it and best practices, check out my post: BCNI Philly: Why beatblog? (and why news should be social)

Best networks for education reporters

• Facebook — Facebook is a no brainer. It originally started as a social network just for college students, then added high school students and now has expanded to allow everyone to join. You’ll find a much higher concentration of college students in particular on Facebook than you will on MySpace. Even many teachers, professors and administrators are joining Facebook these days. It’s the perfect network to find education-related people to interview and even find stories. Every education reporter should at least have a presence on Facebook.
• Twitter – Twitter is a great social network for almost any journalist. In particular, it’s a great tool for crowdsourcing, asking questions and monitoring trends. Check out our screencast on how to use Twitter for reporting and our other screencast on how to use search.twitter.com.

Education beatbloggers to follow

• Tawnell Hobbs/Kent Fischer | DISD Blog — The DISD blog won this year’s EWA award for best multimedia education blog and for good reason. It has been the gold standard for education beatblogs the past 1-2 years. Here are just a few of the lessons you can learn from the DISD blog: Fischer’s readers helped him uncover an A1 story, hoisting comments to build a better community, live blogging to help form a closer connection with readers, providing a public service for readers, etc, etc, etc.
• Alexander Russo | District 299 Blog — Russo has a different kind of beatblog. He centers his blog around “hosting the conversation.” The District 299 is a place where people in Chicago can go to discuss education and the Chicago school district. Russo does original reporting, linking to others content and conversation starting.
• Gotham Schools — This non-profit, new media startup is one to watch. They don’t have an institutional memory and aren’t beholden to how things “used to be.” Instead, they can concentrate on transforming education reporting. We’re big fans of their daily link journalism post too.
• Khristopher Brooks — Brooks use of Facebook is one to emulate. He convinced the University of Nebraska to give him a nebraska.edu e-mail address. This allows him to see most students on the Nebraska Facebook network. Brooks does not grab students profile information without prior permission, however, and he mostly uses Facebook to find students who are studying certain majors or taking certain classes. If Brooks is doing a story where he needs to talk to a student about a controversial class, for instance, he can search the Nebraska Facebook network for students in that class, contact them and get interviews. He essentially uses Facebook as a phone book on steroids. Listen to Brooks discuss how Facebook has made his job much easier.

Best practices

• Be transparent and accessible — Brooks is extremely accessible for Nebraska students because he has put himself on Facebook. If students want to contact him about an issue at Nebraska that he may not know about, they can easily do so via Facebook. It takes far less work on their part to send him a private message via Facebook than it does to hunt down his e-mail address or phone number. The easier you make it for people to contact you, the more likely it is that they will contact you. Get on multiple social networks (with your real name), put a bio and about page on your blog and make sure you have contact info on your blog.
• Be social – This could be as simple as being active in the comments section after stories and blog posts. It also means being an active participant on social networks. If you’re on Twitter, just don’t ask people questions, but answer their questions too. Be social and get to know people. Social media is all about being social. The old way of doing journalism was one-way communication, but today it’s all about two-way communication. Be a part of a conversation.
• Cultivate a community — Being social is the first part of cultivating a community. If you’re lucky enough to be given your own blog, use it to its fullest potential. A blog is a fantastic place to cultivate a community of knowledgeable sources that will send you tips, links and documents. Monica Guzman is the master community cultivator and is someone worth following for ideas on how to build a community.

BCNI Philly: Why beatblog? (and why news should be social)

Below you’ll find a post I created to go with a beatblogging presentation at BCNI Philly.

It’s a quick start guide on what beatblogging is, how to do it and best practices.

What is beatblogging?

Beatblogging is the practice of using social media, blogs and other Web tools for beat reporting.

To be a beatblogger, a journalist must engage in two-way communication. This mean interacting with people on Twitter, in the comments after blog posts and stories, through Facebook and other social networks, by conducting live chats and liveblogs, etc.

It’s important to point out that just because a journalist has a beat and a blog doesn’t make them a beatblogger. That just makes them a beat reporter with a blog. Two-way communication and user interaction are the cornerstones to beatblogging. Conversely, a beat reporter does not need a blog to be a beatblogger.

Two-way communication and interaction can happen on social networks and or during a liveblog, for instance. The key to beatblogging is not, nor will it ever be, about having a blog, but rather it is all about user interaction. We like to call beatblogging Rolodex 2.0, because it’s a way to expand the number of sources a beat reporter has.

In an earlier post Jay Rosen defined a beatblog as:

A beatblog in the expansive sense is any blog that sticks to a well-defined beat or coverage area, whether it is the work of a single person or a team, whether it is authored by a pro or an amateur journalist. A beatblog can be part of a large site, or it could stand on its own. Normally, the beat is explicit and obvious from the home page of the blog, but it is possible for a beat blog to have an “implicit” or unusual beat that isn’t immediately apparent to a casual user.

Content-wise, a beatblog presents a regular flow of reporting and commentary in a focused area the beat covers; it provides links and online resources in that area, and it tracks the subject over time. Beats can be topical (like dot.earth, which is about natural resources and the environment) or narrowly geographic (West Seattle blog) or both (Atlantic Yards Report) or activity-related (Family Life, which is about “raising a family.”)

Why beatblog?

• More sources — Beatblogging allows journalists to find more sources. This means better and easier reporting. Good beatblogging can allow a journalist to cover a beat easier and more in-depth. Many of these new sources will contact beatbloggers with info, documents and links. In today’s era of limited resources and cutbacks, beatblogging is a powerful way to get more out of less.
• Crowdsourcing — Beatblogging can be an excellent way to crowdsource stories and have readers help report. These days, reporters could use all the help they can get, and why not harness the wisdom of our users? Some beatbloggers even ask their readers to be their assignment editors.
• Conversation — Social media is really about having a conversation. Beatblogging can be a great way to get people talking, and this can become a big part of your product. Alexander Russo’s District 299 blog is all about “hosting” the conversation. His blog is designed to be a place for people to discuss Chicago education news and policy, and people come to the blog largely for the conversation. Yes, he has good editorial content too, but the conversations are a big part of what makes his blog special.
• Users add value – People add value to beatblogs. They help reporters report, they leave links and comments after posts, they share their own experiences — they become a reason to come to the site.
  
• More traffic – Good beatbloggers will generate more traffic for their content, because their content will have more around it. A blog that has a strong community built around it with lots of thoughtful comments will get much more traffic because people will be checking back several times a day to see the new comments. People will come to a blog just for the conversation, because comments add value.

Here are what some beatbloggers had to say about beatblogging via Twitter:

chronsciguy – It’s fun. It’s immediate. It makes me a much, much better reporter.

mneznanski Why I beatblog? Because it’s more fun than just writing for a newspaper. Because I know what people are reading. Because I do better, more informed journalism with it than without it.

saraneufeld It’s great source-building and an opportunity to tell stories I can’t in the newspaper. Plus, it’s fun.

Top notch beatbloggers

• Eric Berger — You can’t get much better than a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which Berger was this year because of his stellar beatblogging efforts related to his coverage of Hurricane Ike. This coverage from Berger included live, daily chats about the oncoming storm, continuous updates and coverage on Berger’s SciGuy blog and reports on Chron.com.
• Kent Fischer — Fischer (now out of journalism) was one of the best at using his beatblog to help him report and discover new stories. His beatblog helped him uncover an A1 (and later national in the WSJ) story. His readers routinely fed him stories, documents, etc. Beatblogging simply allowed him to be a better reporter. Listen to why Fischer thought beatblogging was such a useful tool for him as a reporter.
• Monica Guzman — Guzman is the master conversation starter and community cultivator. If you’re looking for ways to build a community around your beat, you can’t find much better than Guzman. Unlike the other beatbloggers listed here, Guzman’s main job is to start conversations with readers.
• Brian Krebs — Krebs is an excellent example of what can happen once a community is cultivated. Many of his readers are quite knowledgeable about computer security and really add to the conversation. In fact, blog posts often pick up once the comments start rolling in. Krebs’s users have added a tremendous amount of value to his blog. Krebs discusses the power of a strong user community in this Q&A.

Best practices

• Cultivating a community — The best way to cultivate a community is to be A) active in your community by responding to comments and B) taking an active role in comment moderation. It takes work to cultivate a community, but it provides rewards. Berger discusses how to build a community in this podcast.
• Hoisting comments – Once a community is cultivated, a beatblogger will want to start acknowledging when people leave strong comments. Many beatbloggrs have begun hoisting comments with weekly “comment of the week” features. It’s a good way to pat readers on the back. Better yet, check out Jon Ortiz’s “blog back” concept. It’s similar to hoisting comments but more in-depth.
• Crowdsourcing — A good beatblog has a large network of sources around it. Many of these sources are experts in in certain fields and topics. Why not ask them for help? The Buzz Out Loud crew discussed how their users know more than they do in this podcast. BOL’s listeners are a big part of the show because they are so knowledgeable, they help report and they provide in-depth knowledge that the hosts often don’t have.
• Be accessible — Make it easy for people to contact you on your blog, Twitter, etc. Good beatbloggers are transparent. People want to interact, so it make it easy for them. Guzman even has weekly in-person office hours and meetups.
• Learn by example — Don’t be afraid to borrow someone else’s good idea. Each week we profile innovative beatbloggers and best practices. If you see something you like, start doing it yourself.

Great examples and lessons

• Blog readers lead to A1 story for Dallas Morning News
• Dispelling FUD on news Web sites and blogs
• Timing can impact traffic to a blog
• Tony Pierce, a “blogger gone pro” at the LA Times | Part 2
  
• Wired.com harnesses readers to produce better content
• Mortgage blogger Tanta, who saw (and wrote) it all, passed away but legend grows

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, 2009

Thank 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.

Posted by DISD Chick @ 11:55 AM Fri, Apr 10, 2009

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)

Posted by Jon Dahlander @ 12:31 PM Fri, Apr 10, 2009 (the spokesman for the DISD)

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 Dahlander

Posted by Taxedout @ 3:47 PM Fri, Apr 10, 2009

Happy 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.

Leaderboard for week of 4-13-2009: Kent Fischer memorial edition

It’s not the best time to work for a newspaper: lay-offs, buy-outs, pay cuts and more

Against this backdrop, one of our favorite beatbloggers, Ed Silverman, left newspapers last year. His former employer, The Star-Ledger, may not survive the year. Another one of our favorite beatbloggers, Kent Fischer, announced that he’ll be leaving journalism too.

Fischer had survived several rounds of lay-offs, buy-outs and pay cuts at The Dallas Morning News but wondered how much more his employer could keep making big cuts, while still delivering a quality product. Fischer’s partner in crime on the DISD Blog, Tawnell Hobbs, will carry on the torch by herself. She’ll be expected to run the blog and be a major contributor to print.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

• Fischer was one of the first beatbloggers to begin hoisting comments. He realized early on that it was important to acknowledge readers when they contributed something worthwhile to the conversation. Each week Fischer has been picking a comment of the week.
• Fischer also began accepting guest posts from community members last year. His blog is read by many insiders, and the majority of the comments left on his blog are from insiders. He wanted to tap into that network and give some of his top contributors the chance to have a bigger voice. Also, Fischer scheduled his guest posts around summer vacation, a time when education coverage is usually light. The summer is the perfect time to start discussions about bigger issues in education.
• Fischer was one of the first journalists I studied that really got that user comments add value to a news Web site. He understood that not only are comments something that attracts users, but they can also be a great place for thoughtful debate. And they can even be a place for beat reporters to discover stories.
• The comments left on the DISD Blog were usually quite good. Fischer took care to make sure a comment ghetto did not form. A strong comments community requires a journalist who is willing to cultivate a community. It takes a journalist who is not afraid to regularly enter the fray, and Fischer genuinely respected the opinions of his users.
• Fischer wasn’t afraid to try anything. He said that he regularly tried new ideas and features and saw what caught on. If something didn’t catch on, he would move on to something new. It was that ethos of experimentation that really allowed Fischer to shine.
• We’ll have more on Fischer, the lessons he learned from beatblogging and why he left journalism in a podcast later today.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post

• Krebs was nominated this week for using his blog to provide context to a series of print stories. He explains why the stories are worth reading, what’s new about them (the topic of cyber terrorism is not new) and he provides background and context. Krebs also provides some nitty gritty details that may be too minute for the print edition. And, as always, his blog is the perfect place to provide links to resources.
• Krebs also did some quick checks on the Internet and found some compromised U.S. utilities. These companies have computers that were recently infected with bots and backdoors. His blog post does an excellent job of explaining what the threats are and how they could be harmful to U.S. citizens.
• Again, it’s the comments where this post really begins to shine. Krebs has built up a knowledgeable user community. In the comments you’ll find users asking questions about how easy it is to become infected, what precautions should be taken, etc, and you’ll find other users providing detailed answers.
• Krebs did not write the print stories he linked to, but he did provide excellent context around them. His blog post was a strong compliment to the print content his paper product.

Brian Christopherson | Lincoln Journal Star

• Life in the Red, a joint, staff blog at the Journal Star is one of the better sports blogs we’ve seen. The beat is all things Nebraska Cornhusker related, and a team of five bloggers shares the responsibility.
• One of the things we really like about this blog is the interaction. Sports fans are often a very passionate bunch and sometimes quite knowledgeable. They would love the chance to get to interact with sports writers they follow. On this seemingly simple post, Christopherson and users are discussing safeties for the Nebrasks football team. It all started with a simple post about redshirt freshman P.J. Smith and a quote from head coach Bo Pelini saying Smith could push for playing time with senior Larry Asante.
• This is the kind of little nugget of information that probably wouldn’t make a good print story. Even if it were a print story (or part of a “news an notes” kind of feature) it wouldn’t be nearly the same as doing it online. Each nugget of information gets its own blog post (good for SEO and segregating conversations to individual topics). Breaking these nuggets into individual posts increases visits and comments.
• Also, the Life in Red blog provides the perfect opportunity for beat reporters and fans to discuss minute topics like this. All of the sudden this seemingly small nugget of information becomes a launching pad for debate among writers and users.

DISD blog wins national education reporting award

Two of our favorite beatbloggers, Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs of the DISD Blog, were recognized by the Education Writers Association for the best multimedia education blog.

The Education Writers Association (EWA), the national professional association of education reporters and writers, today announced the winners of the 2008 National Awards for Education Reporting, the prestigious national competition for education writing. The annual contest honors the best education reporting in the print and broadcast media and is the only independent contest of its kind in the United States. Contest entries were limited to stories published or broadcast for the first time during the 2008 calendar year.

Fischer and Hobbs will find out for a few months why the judges picked them as the top multimedia education blog, but Fischer said their application focused heavily on community aspects of their blogs and the conversations they created. Fischer and Hobbs also made it clear that this was a hard news blog that regularly broke news.

“This award tells me that we’re not wrong — all of us journalists who know that blogging extends our reach into the community,” Hobbs said. “The EWA award validates that the Dallas ISD blog is a ‘multimedia’ reporting tool that can be used to help tell a story.”

The DISD blog has been a success for the Morning News when measured by a variety of metrics: content created, pageviews, user conversations and content that originates on the blog and makes it into print. Editors want to try to bottle some of the lessons and best practices from the DISD blog and share them with the rest of the newsroom.

“There is definitely here at the Morning News a growing effort to take what Tawnell and I have learned from our year of beatblogging and to spread the word, the gospel so to speak, to other reporters on other beats who are interested in dipping their toes into beatblogging,” Fischer said.

Fischer will be conducting brown bag lunches where reporters and editors can come and learn about beatblogging. He’ll be explaining what beatblogging is, examples of what he and Hobbs have done and how he approaches the art of beatblogging.

There will also be beatblogging sessions aimed at editors. Fischer said editors’ roles are changing, and because of that editors have to change their expectations for the kind of work that will produced and how much of it will be produced.

“Beatblogs aren’t successful if editors don’t change the ways they manage reporters,” Fischer said. “A beatblog is practically a full-time job in itself. You can’t have the same level of expectations on your reporters to produce for print and then sort of throw a beatblog on top of that and expect it to be a success.”

Fischer said people at his paper are beginning to realize that pageviews aren’t enough when measuring success or failure. It’s now becoming about creating niches and communities online that are highly focused. They believe these highly focused audiences will appeal much more to advertisers.

“I think what they’ve come to realize is that to be successful online, it’s not about total pageviews, it’s about creating a community in a sort of a dedicated core of community members who are going to be highly engaged and conversant with each other on niche topics,” Fischer said.

Fischer and Hobbs are still working out how to best work on two distinct products with unique audiences at once. Both work on the blog and create content for print. They still have to do a lot of duplicating content between the mediums.

“I find the print product to be frankly annoying,” Fischer said. “I don’t think about print anymore. I come in everyday, and I blog. Blog posts that blow up on me, become really popular and get lots of comments, those become candidates for print stories. If I blog all day and I don’t have anything that blows up like that than I consider myself not to have anything cooking for print the next day.”

Kent and I also discussed many other topics for this week’s podcast. Those topics include:

• What newsroom technology hurdles do you run into? What can’t you do because of the limited Web technology you are allowed to use?
• Who will be attending the beatblogging training sessions?
• What do you hope reporters and editors get out of the beatblogging training sessions?
• How has your beatblogging changed in the past year?
• How are the beatblog and print audiences different? How does that impact content creation?

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

What it takes to be a beatblogger

Want to know what it takes to be a beatblogger? Not sure where to start? Who is doing it already? Here is your simple introduction to the new revolutionary practice that is changing the world of digital journalism.

A beatblogger isn’t just a blogger.

Twitter isn’t merely “Facebook Status Updates.” It’s much more. Likewise, beatblogging is more than just a journalist being assigned to blog for a major news publication. A beatblogger, simply put, is a beat reporter who uses their blog as a tool to engage their readers, interact with them, use them as sources, crowdsource their ideas and invite them to contribute to the reporting process.

When a beat reporter uses social networking with the community to create hyper-local and hyper-focused stories – that’s beatblogging. As a result, the beat is better researched because the community that is directly involved with the subject is actively participating in creating news.

Your readers are your new BFF’s. Get to know them. Invite them to dinner.

Okay, so you don’t exactly have to invite them into your home, but you get the idea. Beatblogging requires reporters to start conversations with their readers. But simply replying to a few comments doesn’t cut it. It’s the year 2009. You have to be way more active than that. This means asking questions, replying to comments, seeking out tips, using their story ideas and building stories upon their conversations.

More often than not you’ll be required to continue conversations on older stories even when you are already working on a new project. This can be tiring, time-consuming and hard work. But the trade-off is that much of the researching and source-chasing that journalists used to undergo is eliminated through the first degree contact with the community.

If you haven’t spoken to your audience, if you don’t know who your most loyal reader is, if you haven’t written a story based on a tip from the comments section of your blog and if you haven’t asked the crowd for help — you’re losing. You’re not using 2009 tools to be at the forefront of the digital revolution. And you’re certainly not a beatblogger.

Be everywhere. I’m not kidding.

Journalists in the 21st century can no longer hide behind their bylines. I can’t stress enough how important it is for bloggers to be accessible through all networks and social sites. Where’s your “about” page? Is your e-mail easy to find? Do you have a photo up?  Even some of the most successful beatbloggers today have not been doing a good job of making themselves transparent.

It’s important to bridge the gap between reader and source and build a circle of trust. And the only way this can happen successfully is if both sides agree to be transparent. If bloggers are annoyed by snarky, anonymous commenters, then lead by example. Don’t hide information about yourself either.

Be accessible. That means I should be able to find your name, a photo, e-mail, Facebook page, LinkedIN account, Twitter name and possibly an e-mail. That’s it. It’s not too hard, and it will make your beatblogging experience world’s easier. (P.S. Want to be a top search result when searching for the term ‘beatblogger’? Then make sure to add the keyword multiple times in your various social profiles!).

Learn by example. It’s okay to copy practices. Don’t worry, it’s not plagiarism.

Journalists hate to copy. They don’t like anything that isn’t original or different. They like to be the first to report on a story or have a certain angle. But sometimes it’s okay to copy, especially in the case of beatblogging. What this means is that you should look at what current beatbloggers are doing successfully and emulate their methods to form your own beatblog.

Take a look at Kent Fischer from the Dallas Independent School District Blog, who is building a “blog on steroids.” Fischer’s blog is essentially a micro-site, a niche publication that covers the education system in Dallas, Texas by combining beatblogging with database reporting.

Learn from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Monica Guzman as she innovate with her weekly office hours for readers. Guzman connects with her users on her blog, The Big Blog, on social media sites like Twitter and in person. Guzman is a master conversation starter and uses her networks to get people talking about issues in Seattle and about the PI’s content. The Big Blog is all about cultivating conversations and there is no one better than Guzman at that.

Check out Brian Stelter from the New York Times who is beatblogging at “TV Decoder,” where he covers the day’s on-screen and behind-the-scenes developments, with insights into Nielsen ratings and the machinations of the TV industry. Stelter has found that it’s easier to share stories, ideas, links and be able to ask for advice, contacts, and sources. He is always opening himself up to opinions, more points of view and more sources. Likewise, users send Stelter feedback and actually like to contribute because they feel more connected. He is a real person they can interact with.

Watch Daniel Victor, the twenty-four year old reporter for The (Harrisburg, Pa.) Patriot-News. Victor is trying his hand at mobile journalism, and he’s convinced that community-building and crowdsourcing are the two biggest keys to journalism’s future. Victor experimented with a Ning network that ultimately didn’t work out, but it hasn’t deterred him from innovating. Victor’s latest venture is a blog where Victor asks his reader’s to be his assignment editor. Readers are, literally, his assignment editors — researching, contributing ideas and suggesting stories.

Lastly… INNOVATE!

The most marked characteristic of beatbloggers is that they all took it upon themselves to pitch new ideas to their editors and take on radical experiments that had never been attempted in the world of journalism. A true beatblogger never stops trying to innovate and create new ways of using the community and social media tools to improve journalism. Don’t be afraid to use your own methods. And when you do, be sure to send us your work our way!

Did this article help? Comments or questions? Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments or send a tweet to @MsBeat.

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.

Leaderboard for week of 1-19-09: Users adding value

This week’s Leaderboard is about users adding value to journalists’ content.

Good beat bloggers build strong communities around their beats. These communities not only can help journalists report news and stay up-to-date on industry news, but they can also add value with strong comments after posts. Slashdot in particular has made an art form out of having comments after posts be more valuable than the original posts themselves (not coincidentally, Slashdot has one of the best commenting systems around).

Just about all of the beat bloggers we follow have built strong communities. These communities help journalists report, but there are some beat bloggers who have built such strong communities that their users and their comments and links are just as imporant as the original content itself.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

• We’ll say it again, Comment of the Week is a feature that every beat blogger should copy.
• So many journalists are worried about allowing comments on posts and other content. Want to know a great way to get great comments from users? Acknowledge when users leave great comments. That’s exactly what Fischer does, and his blog has some really good comments. It also has a strong community around it.
• Fischer regularly interacts with users on his blog, and this is a key to building a strong community around a blog. By interacting with users, Fischer also has fomented a stronger and more civil community around his blog.
• Many news organizations have done a wonderful job of creating comment ghettos, filled with inappropriate, acidic, banal and often off-topic comments. These comment ghettos represent everything that many journalists hate about user comments.
• Fischer and other beat bloggers have prevented comment ghettos from forming by being active in their communities. Acknowledging when users leave comments that really add to the conversation is another great way to prevent comment ghettos from forming.

Matt Neznanski | Corvallis Gazette Times

• Live blogging is a great way to utilize the Web in ways that print never could. Services like CoveritLive make it easy for journalists to cover live events in real time. Twitter is also another popular way to provide real-time coverage of events.
• Live blogging is much more than just providing instaneous updates. It’s also about allowing people to have a voice. CoveritLive, Twitter and other services allow users to submit questions and make comments. A journalist can take this real-time questions and ask city council members, for instance, their thoughts.
• A live blog also has value after an event is over. CoveritLive makes it easy to create an archive of a live blog for users to read.
• Neznanski shows the power and immediacy of live blogging when he recently covered a City Blog meeting on homelessness. CoveritLive is quickly becoming a big-time tool for beat bloggers.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post

• We’re continually amazed by the quality of the community around Krebs’ Security Fix blog. Good beat blogging is a way to build a strong community. Security Fix reminds us of Slashdot but with better original content.
• Krebs routinely makes posts that his users add additional insight and links in the comments section. Krebs himself is also very active in the comments section, answering questions and helping users out. There is an incredible sense of community on his blog where people are there for each other.
• This past week Krebs reported on fake online shopping sites that were trying to spoof legitimate sites. The debate and discussion after the post is arguably better than the original post itself. Users are sharing more fake sites to avoid, ways to tell if a site is fake or has a good reputation and tools people can use to make e-commerce safer.
• This is what happens when you build a strong community of knowledgeable users. It’s hard to imagine Security Fix without user comments. Many journalists fear user comments, but Krebs and Security Fix show how comments can add a lot of value to journalism.

Leaderboard for week of 12-22-08: The best of the best

We thought we’d end this year with some of this year’s pace setters in the world of beat blogging.

These are some of best beat bloggers out there, and these people are constantly trying new ways to innovate. We do try to present a diversity of beat reporters on this blog, but on any given week, any one of these beat bloggers could be on the Leaderboard. Every week they are pushing the practice.

If you’re a journalist and you want to learn how to harness social media and other Web tools better, I strongly recommend you follow these beat bloggers every week.

DISD blog | The Dallas Morning News

• This award goes to both Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs. They have produced one of the best beat blogs around.
• Who said that people don’t want to read about topics like education? The DISD blog is on track for more than 1,500,000 page views in its first year. That easily surpassed expectations. Just think of the page views that this blog could get if Fischer is able to build that blog on steroids that he is planning.
• Keep in mind that both Fischer and Hobbs also write for the print edition. This is a pretty impressive start for these two reporters, especially since their beat isn’t the easiest to get page views with.
• Perhaps the greatest success of the DISD blog is how active the community is around it. It has really spurred conversation and given people almost a public town hall where they can discuss the Dallas school district. 
• You know how you surpass expectations? You provide in-depth coverage, including live blogging big events. You also provide a fantastic place for people to express themselves. And finally, you provide a community where people want to help you out.
• When you do that, your community can help you uncover big stories. They can also act as a truth squad by fact checking what public figures say.
• People will be more likely to be active in your community if you acknowledge when they write something smart. That’s why Fischer started hoisting comments.

Eric Berger | The Houston Chronicle

• The SciGuy is one of the most innovative beat reporters around. Some of the things he does aren’t exactly social media or Web related per se, but they rock nonetheless. He is the master at building a community.
• No, technically conducting random drawings for science books does not count as beat blogging, but it is one hell of a way to build a community and build user loyalty. 
• Berger is sent many science books over the course of a year for review purposes. He thought it would be a good idea to conduct a random drawing for the five best books he received this year.
• Want to enter the drawing? All you have to do is leave a comment on his post about the book. So, not only is Berger finding a good way to recycle these books, but he also managed to get people talking about science topics. Check out all the wonderful comments left on that post.
• Plus, these posts might be a way to get people who have never commented before to start commenting. Why not do something like this?
• Berger does other innovative things, like asking his readers to be his assignment editor.
• Berger also understands that his users know more than he does.

Monica Guzman | Seattle Post-Intelligencer

• Want to know how to get a conversation started? Just follow what Guzman does. Her job is centered around getting people talking. 
• One of Guzman’s core jobs is to analyze posts to cultivate conservations. She reads what her colleagues write and tries to find interesting jumping off points for discussion. 
• For Guzman, cultivating conversations is a great way to build a community. Ultimately, building a community is at the core of beat blogging. 
• We often call beat blogging a sort of Rolodex 2.0. It greatly expands the number of available sources that a beat reporter has access to. But the only way to meaningfully expand that network of sources is to cultivate a community. 
• Guzman is also one of the most active beat bloggers on Twitter. 

Jon Ortiz | The Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz has only been beat blogging for about six months, but he has easily been one of the most innovative and adventurous around. Perhaps because he is new to blogging he is more willing to take risks and try new things. 
• Whatever the reason, The State Worker blog is a most follow. He has developed several distinct features that help break up the flow of his blog. 
• His “Blog back” feature is something every beat blogger should copy. 
• Ortiz has launched another new feature recently. This one he calls “From the notebook.” This feature is extra tidbits of information that don’t make it into columns or stories that Ortiz writes. 
• This is another one of those features that Ortiz created that doesn’t take a lot of time, but it provides his users with something of value.
• Ortiz launched his blog early so he could cover the budget crisis in California as it broke. It turned out to be a momentous decision for Ortiz. Timing can have a big impact on the success of a blog.