Beatblogging frees reporters from column inches

Stephanie De Pasquale is an entertainment reporter and beatblogger for The Quad-City Times. You can connect with her on Twitter and several other social networks. Find out more about how she is pushing the practice of beat reporting.

I often use my blog to write about pieces of an interview and sometimes entire stories that there just isn’t room for in the paper and to cover events that end too late to make deadline.

Using the blog to write about items that won’t fit in the paper has become an important part of my beat at The Quad-City Times. My news organization, like many newspapers across the country, recently reduced the size of its paper. Most of the time all there is room for in the weekly entertainment section I write for are 15-inch stories, including breakouts.

More often than not I have funny quotes and vignettes left over from interviews that my readers would be interested in but just won’t fit in print. Now I can put them in my blog.

My most recent example of this was in a preview of the dance group the JabbaWockeeZ.They are coming to a local event center with New Kids on the Block. When my 15 inches were up, I still had more to write about but, while interesting, it wasn’t essential to my story so I put it in a blog post.

I also covered a teen film festival put on by our local library. For the festival, area teens learned how to make videos, and their movies were screened at a local IMAX theatre. When I covered the festival last year, I wrote 10-inches ahead of time from an interview with a librarian, talked to the teens before the event and then had to leave before the screenings started in order to make deadline. Not this time.

Last winter the Quad-City Times moved to two editions, so my deadline was even earlier this year. Instead of writing a crappy story that barely included any quotes from the teens that actually made the movies for the festival, I chose to preview the event in print and blog about the post-event coverage so I could do the festival justice.

Granted, I didn’t write my post like I would write a story, but instead I wrote a the short, conversational tone that I take in my blog. But I’m much happier with the end product than I would have been if I had just topped off a pre-written chunk with a quote from a teen, which is all I would have had time for if I covered it for the print edition.

I also routinely use my blog to review local shows that are of interest to my readers, but aren’t quite big enough to warrant a review in print.

Excerpts from my blog are run in print in our entertainment section each week, so our core print readers are reminded on a weekly basis what I’ve been up to online. The comments I hear from readers are that almost everyone reads me online and about half read the shortened versions in print as well.

But no matter where they read me, they’re able to get content that I would not be able to write about if it weren’t for my blog.