Beat blogging lessons from ONA 08

There were not any beat blogging-specific sessions at ONA, but there were several valuable lessons I learned that are applicable for beat bloggers.

Comment moderation

• This idea that if you do any comment moderation you are liable for anything that is written within your comments section is false. Very false.
• Write this down: You can moderate your comments for profanity, spam, banality, etc and still have libel protections for anything you miss or don’t realize is libelous.
• The idea that moderating comments makes us libel is based off of old case law that has since been superseded. I strongly encourage you to read what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about Section 230, which provides protections against libel on the Internet.
• “Courts have held that Section 230 prevents you from being held liable even if you exercise the usual prerogative of publishers to edit the material you publish. You may also delete entire posts. However, you may still be held responsible for information you provide in commentary or through editing.”
• A news organization or independent blogger is only liable for comments that become libelous because of editorial decisions. For instance, if someone wrote a comment that said, “Joe Smith is not an alcoholic,” and I edited out the “not,” I would have just made that comment libelous.

Supply and demand

• This is an issue facing journalism on the Web and not just beat bloggers. Right now, there is simply more supply of written content than there is of demand for it from advertisers. This means low CPMs for written content. It also means that text-only beat bloggers need to get a lot of page views to make a decent amount of revenue.
• On the other hand, there isn’t enough supply of video content on the Web to meet advertisers demands. Advertisers love video ads and pre-roll. They want to stick it on your content, but are having trouble finding enough content.
• I’m not suggesting that everyone jump to doing video, but diversifying content can help boost revenue. This could be a once-a-week podcast or vodcast with a few ads in it. It could mean shooting some video for your beat blog. But realize that video content can get a much higher ad rate than printed content can.

Did you learn any other valuable beat blogging tips fron ONA 08? Please share.