Serious pageviews for serious news at The Sacramento Bee

Jon Ortiz’s The State Worker blog is proving that serious news can get serious pageviews.

It’s not sports, nor gossip, nor opinion garnering the most pageviews at The Sacramento Bee, but the rather it’s Ortiz’s excellent beatblog on state workers in California. Ortiz picked the perfect time to start the blog — right as the budget impasse in California was beginning a year ago — and has provided incredible coverage ever since. The budget still isn’t fixed in California, workers have faced furloughs, IOUs are being issued instead of payment and, in general, the state is in upheveal.

Ortiz picked the perfect time to provide his unique brand of dogged coverage and community building and engagement. His blog is a great source for original news, curation and a strong community of state workers. Ortiz estimates that the blog is reaching one-third to half of all state workers in California.

Ortiz is showing that people are interested in serious news on the Web, especially if it A) impacts their lives, B) is timely and C) provides a great community.

Below you’ll find the top five blogs at the SacBee. Each had at least 250,000 pageviews last month, with The State Worker more than doubling that:

• The State Worker
• Sacto 9-1-1 (has a link on Yahoo! news)
• The Frame (a photo blog that The Bee is aggressively marketing)
• Capitol Alert (The State Worker’s sister political insider blog)
• 49ers Blog Q&A

Also keep in mind that The State Worker is a little more than a year old. It didn’t take long for this blog to really take off.

Leaderboard for week of 12-7-08: Public service edition

Beat blogging is all about expanding ones networks using social media, blogging and other Web tools.

An expanded network allows for more tips and more chances for crowd sourcing. But people are much more likely to help journalists with their reporting if journalists provide a tangible service to them. Many of our beat bloggers have given users an unprecedented level of coverage and also helped provide their users with a service.

For instance, Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs alerted Dallas school teachers to career fares and job openings after many of them were laid off due to an unexpected budget crisis. They’ve built good will with many of their readers.

Our lead nominee this week provides quality journalism and a service to his readers.

Brian Krebs | The Washington Post

• Krebs helps his readers out, and you know what, they help him out. Journalists who want to use social media and Web tools in a very one-way, me-focused manner will find limited success. 
• Krebs was nominated for his post encouraging users to update Java on their computers because cyber criminals have a history of targeting Java vulnerabilities. This post reminds readers of the importance of updating Java on their PCs. Krebs also links to a tool that will let users know if they have the latest version of Java.
• In addition, Krebs links to a free tool from Secunia that helps Windows users stay up-to-date on all their software. While reporting on Java vulnerabilities and patches is his beat, Krebs doesn’t have to go out of his way to make sure people are as secure as possible on their PCs.
• The usefullness of Krebs’ blog, however, just begins with his blog posts. One user asked for examples of when cyber criminals attacked Java, and Krebs provided three examples. Other users were having trouble with Adobe Flash and Secunia. Krebs offered solutions to those problems as well. 
• If you want users to help you do your job better (by expanding your network of useful sources) than it makes sense to help users out. Krebs follows this principle. 

Tawnell Hobbs | The Dallas Morning News

• Hobbs puts a tough question up to her readers. “Should Dallas teachers who missed out on receiving federal grant money because their principals failed to follow rules receive the cash from DISD?”
• This question becomes tough to answer because the Dallas Independent School District has been facing a financial crisis for months. Yet, many teachers missed out on federal funds ranging from $1,000-10,000 per teacher just because some principals failed to follow federal rules properly. Some of the teachers who qualified recently lost their jobs because of a reduction in force due to the budget crisis. DISD trustees are split on what to do.
• What better way to judge opinion than to ask your readers? Hobbs can use the comments she gets from readers (most of which are a part of DISD or former, laid-off colleagues) as a launching pad to a follow up story on opinion. Her blog is also a great place for public debate.
• In addition, the blog has been a great tool for Hobbs and her partner, Kent Fischer, to get tips from DISD employees. 

Jon Ortiz | The Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz wins this award again for his fantastic Blog Back feature. It’s a feature that every beat blogger should seriously consider adopting ASAP.
• Let’s look at the benefits of this feature. It doesn’t take a lot of time to produce, it’s a popular feature with users that elicits comments and it generates a sizable traffic boost to old content that is linked to. Plus, it recognizes strong reader comments and encourages more. Many journalists complain that allowing user comments is a mistake because most of them are banal or hateful or whatever. But when a beat reporter acknowledges strong comments, it encourages every commentator to rise his game. 
• Also, journalists who read and respond to users tend to get much better comments on their blogs in the first place. It’s all about taking responsibility for your community. Either you’re a community builder or a destroyer. These three Leaderboard recipients are community builders.

Interview with Jon Ortiz about ‘blog backs’

The Sacramento Bee’s Jon Ortiz recently launched a new feature called “blog backs” that has quickly become a hit with users on his State Worker blog.

It’s similar to hoisting comments, but it’s more in depth than that. Both features are ultimately about community building and help foment better and more sensible comments from users.

Blog backs are a combination of hoisting strong comments from users, and of clarifying of points of fact that people didn’t understand in posts from bloggers.

“People really need some amplification on points that we were making in the blog,” Ortiz said about starting the feature. “We also have some people who put some time and effort into their comments and we want to recognize those.”

This new feature doesn’t take long to create. His first week it took him about two hours, but he has streamlined the process since then. In his third week he was able to put this feature together in 20 minutes.

“Instead of waiting until the end of the week to review the comments and the blog entries, as the week went along I took would take note of comments that I thought were particularly blog back worthy,” he said. “I got everything done ahead of time as the week went along. It’s pretty much then just a matter of pasting that into Moveable Type.”

A post that takes Ortiz 20 minutes to create significantly increased traffic to his blog. Not only do the blog back posts themselves get a lot of page views, but the old posts that are linked to in the blog back see on average of about a 10 percent boost in traffic.

“The hit counts to the page are very high and I think it gives people a way to quickly look back and see what they’ve missed,” he said about his new feature.

Some other topics discussed:

• Have other newsroom bloggers adopted this feature?
• Are there certain kinds of blogs this feature makes more sense for? Do some blogs not work with this?
• Why should other bloggers look into doing blog backs?

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

Leaderboard for week of 11-3-08: virtual government edition

This week’s leaderboard is an eclectic bunch.

We’ve got a large newspaper represented and a new media blog in the same week. What this week’s edition is really about is finding innovative ways to cover beats. Some of those beats, like state government, aren’t new, but that shouldn’t stop us from finding new ways to cover those beats.

Other beats, well they are very new. And those kinds of beats can’t be covered by traditional means.

Jon Ortiz | The Sacramento Bee

• Ortiz got off to a blistering start this year on his beat blog thanks to his great coverage of the California budget crisis. Covering a crisis well is a great way to drive traffic. In Ortiz’s case, it was a great way to get people interested in his new beat blog.
• Ortiz is asking simple questions that help speak truth to power. In this instance, that power is the State of California and its workers who have access to loads of sensitive data. He wants to get a dialogue going about this issue and is using his blog to do so.

Matt Neznanski | Gazette Times

• Neznanski is using his blog to solicit reader feedback for future stories. He specifically wants to talk to users about economy related questions. Neznanski wants to hear from his users about how the economic crisis is affecting their lives.
• One of the great strengths of blogging and social media is the ability to interact with users.
• It doesn’t take a lot of effort to make a blog post asking users for their feedback. We do the same thing on BeatBlogging.Org. A simple blog post will result in several people e-mailing us, posting comments on our site and sending us messages on social networks like Twitter.
• Also, by being open about what you’re looking for, users will often suggest you look at other related areas as well.

Anne Laurent | The Agile Mind

• Laurent covers the mysterious world of virtual government. Yes, the U.S. government is active in online worlds like Second Life.
• And what better way to cover how the government is using virtual worlds for government purposes than to join those virtual worlds? That’s one component to Laurent’s coverage.
• She also blogs and uses multimedia to cover her beat. This is a difficult beat to cover, and Laurent does it very well by harnessing a variety of online tools. Her embedded YouTube videos on her blog are very helpful for explaining what exactly governments do with virtual worlds.