Interview with Coulter about newsroom beat blogging training
Melissa Coulter has begun training her newsroom colleagues at The Quad-City Times about blogging and social media tools to help reporters cover their beats better.
There is a difference between training people on how to blog or how to get on social networks and training people how to use those tools for beat blogging. Coulter focused on the latter. At its core, beat blogging is about using social media, blogs and other Web tools to help build networks around a beat.
Print beat reporters have networks around their beats too, but they are smaller and usually comprised of insiders. Beat blogging is a sort of Rolodex 2.0 that allows people to expand their beats and connect with people they would have never been able to otherwise. These larger networks make it easier for beat reporters to report.
This first round of training Coulter conducted was an hour long, introductory presentation. It was more about introducing people to the possibilities that beat blogging and social media offers and to get people thinking.
“It sparks a lot of interesting conversations,” she said. “This is sort of a first step to get more people in our newsroom to use these tools for reporting.”
The training went well and spurred discussion, but, like in all newsrooms, there were people who were unsure about this new technology. The biggest concern that Coulter ran into is whether or not beat blogging and social media would be worth their time. After all, many journalists are already very busy because of staff cuts.
“It’s sort of a chicken and an egg question,” she said. “It takes time to build your audience when you’re beat blogging, and I think they sort of expect to have an audience right out of the gate like they do when the newspaper drops on the front porch to 50,000 subscribers.”
That is a real risk. Some reporters will find tremendous success with beat blogging and social media, while others will receive a more tepid response from users. A large part of success is knowing which tools make since for each beat and how to go about using these techniques for each beat.
A one-size fits all approach will probably lead to a lot of failure for reporters. At the Quad-City Times, Coulter gave a general presentation, but she also works with individual beat reporters to see what could work best for their beats. She also showed examples of people who were doing beat blogging well. A great way to quiet skeptics is to use examples from beat bloggers like Kent Fischer, Eric Berger, Monica Guzman, et al that we have chronicled here at BeatBlogging.Org.
Some of Coulter’s colleagues who had been practicing beat reporting gave examples of some of the success they have had. They talked about how their audiences have grown and become more helpful over time.
“Just hearing from their colleagues really impacted them,” she said.
Coulter said that examples from beat reporters about their success seemed to have a bigger impact on her colleagues than her lecturing to them. Some people are resistant to beat blogging and social media for other reasons, like not being that comfortable with technology and the Web.
“That’s just going to take some hand holding, quite frankly,” she said.
The Quad-City Times probably has a more active newsroom with social media than is typical because of Quadsville, the dedicated social networking site that The Quad-City Times built for its readers. All employees at the paper are encouraged to go on the social network and interact with people in the community.
“That sort of forced them to get a little more comfortable with this technology,” she said.
Her editor in chief told her after the session that she wanted her to do it again, but this time it would be mandatory for all beat reporters.
Coulter gave this final bit of advice:
“The best way to convince them that this is useful and to teach them how to do it well is to have them read the blogs of people doing it well.”
Also check out our interview with Mary Louise Schumacher about the newsroom training she gave about social media.
Some more topics discussed:
- How many people in your newsroom are on social networks already? Which networks are they on?
- What suggestions would you have for other people interested in conducting beat blogging and social media training in their newsroom?
- What are the advantages of beat blogging? Why get into social media?
Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.
Journalists opening up on social media
Traditionally journalists — especially print — have hid behind bylines and their professional personas.
In the name of objectivity, journalists were told to keep their personal lives separate from their professional work. Journalists just reported the news and that was that (just the finished product, not the journey). That worked fine in a pre-Internet world.
But honestly, how many people on Twitter have a lot of followers acting like that? Virtually none. Same with bloggers.
The Web is an interactive medium, and who wants to interact with a robot? Professor Carrie Brown created a thought provoking video about journalists opening up on social media. In fact, she argues that journalists must open up on social media to harness the platform properly.
“I don’t think social media will really work for journalists, unless we are willing to share a little bit about ourselves and our personalities,” Brown said in the video.
The idea is not to write about issues like politics, who you voted for or other divisive topics, but rather to become more human. Beat blogger Ron Sylvester also has made the same point earlier this year. He has tweeted about how he injured his knee, and it has humanized him to readers.
“People come to social media with a different set of expectations,” Brown said. “They want to see that there is kind of a real person with a personality behind the byline.”
Then there is a the Colonel Tribune approach. The Colonel is not a real person, of course, but it’s a fun and fascinating online persona that Tribune Interactive has created. The Colonel approach might only work once per paper, but it is interesting how people positively respond to a fake persona (instead of the robot approach that other papers have tried).
This is a tricky road to navigate, however. The last thing journalists would want to do is to turn off potential readers. So, where is the line?
How human should journalists become on social networks? Does your news organization have rules about how to act on social media? Are you allowed to open up?
Interview with Schumacher about conducting newsroom social media training
Mary Louise Schumacher, art and architecture critic with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was recently tasked with teaching her newsroom about social media and beat blogging.
What worked? What didn’t work? What did her peers think about all this fancy social media?
And most importantly, how can social media and beat blogging improve their reporting and make their jobs easier?
“There has been a lot of buzz in the newsroom about [social media], and people don’t know how to use these tools,” she said about why her paper started offering training.
The Journal Sentinel has come out as an early leader in giving social media training to its employees. Rather than just encourage its employees to use social media, the Journal Sentinel decided to discuss how to use social media to improve their journalism. Schumacher and her colleagues also had discussions about the ethical dilemmas that arise for journalists from social media.
The sessions were limited to 6-8 people per training session. This allowed Schumacher to spend the last 45 minutes of each two hour training session talking to individual reporters about how they could use these tools for their beats. Different social media tools work better for different beats, but the idea of beat blogging and expanding a journalist’s network can strengthen any beat.
“Of course what works for me as the art critic is going to be very different than what works for a political reporter,” Schumacher said.
Carefully considering which tools to use and how to use them for each beat and each reporter could lead to less frustration, more success and better results. When dealing with people who are often new to these technologies, more guidance tends to yield better results and also avoid some of the missteps can happen with social media. For instance, Schumacher said that many of the people who came into her training sessions never thought of using social media for beat blogging.
“A lot of people came expecting something very different than what they got,” she said. “But I think people were coming expecting to hear more about how to get our content out into the click stream, so to speak, and how to get our stories out where people are looking at them on the Web.”
While it’s not a bad idea to disseminate content onto new platforms, that’s hardly the best way to use social media. The best journalists and news organizations use social networks to be a part of a larger conversation — to connect with people. Just using social media to bring in more Web traffic would be wasting the vast potential that social media offers for journalism and beat reporters.
“What we focused on in the training sessions is how to use networks and how to build communities around your beats to be better reporters, to actually improve your journalism,” she said. “That came as a little bit as a surprise to people, and I think a pleasant surprise.”
Listen to this podcast to hear why your newsroom should conduct beat blogging and social media training.
Also, don’t miss the fantastic conversation that Schumacher started about which online tools are best for reporters.
Some other topics discussed:
- Why does beat blogging make journalism better?
- What concerns arise with social media and journalistic ethics?
- Has anyone found stories using social media since the training?
- How did the training go over with the newsroom?
- Are certain social media tools going over better with your newsroom than others? Are some easier to pick up?
- What kinds of tips would you offer to people who want to conduct social media training in their news organization?
