How to work a popular beat on the Web

Beatblogging is all about niche. It thrives on a specific focus. For many beatbloggers, it’s the un-tapped niche that garners them attention and lures readers. It’s the “crime on second avenue” beat that gets noticed by worried locals and the “death of print” beat that gets noticed by worried journalists.

But what happens when your beat is too popular?

For Sascha Segan, PC Magazine’s mobile phone expert, that’s both the problem and the solution. Segan writes for the gadget beat on PCMag’s blog, Gearlog, “A Gadget Guide By Geeks, For Geeks.” Yet, it’s a niche topic that is covered by high-traffic blogs like Gizmodo, Engadget and LifeHacker.

“It’s absolutely very competitive,” Segan said. “We have our strengths , which is that Gearlog has grown out of a larger, more traditional organization — PC Magazine.”

According to Segan, it’s important that Gearlog be able to draw out all the resources of PCMag and have more of an establishment perspective than the other tech/gadget blogs. “We try to give a different spin and history behind our stories,” he explained.

What Segan likes about his job is that he gets to create original material, rather than just aggregation work or linking to other blogs.

“There are some areas where I do a lot more research and in-depth reporting than Gizmodo,” he said. “I do a lot more reviews than them, while they cover a lot of news events.”

For instance, Segan recently broke the story on the Al Gore’s barring of “press coverage” at the CTIA Wireless mobile phone industry trade show.

“If Gore thinks that he’s going to somehow stop 4,000 mobile technology experts, all carrying smart phones, from blogging, tweeting and even recording his speech, he has a 19th-century idea of how information flows,” wrote Segan on Gearlog.

Other examples of Segan’s work include step-by-step notes on testing the iPhone for the first time (a great list of features, capabilities, as well as limits and let-downs), personally testing the Verizon G’zOne phone underwater, and live metablogging the Apple WWDC Announcement last summer. Or what about when Segan discovered a mysterious, password-protected page on Palmwc2009.com that ended up being a mistake on Palm’s part (The company intended only to let Palm employees see the site, not the public)? Segan’s articles are usually popular and ranked high on TechMeme.

But in the end — sites like Gizmodo and Engadget get all the traffic, so why not go write for them?

“I like everything about working for PCMag,” says Segan. “There’s a different mood here. We’re not quite as moment to moment as other blogs. Because we come from a magazine perspective, you can sit down and work on a story or review for a couple of days. You can be more focused on getting things neat, accurate and 100% correct in a very traditional journalism type of way.”

Segan added although some of the mainstream gadget blogs used to produce more second-hand news, many of them now do a lot of first-hand reporting and good journalism, especially Engadget (in his opinion).

In the end, Segan has found that the blogging world has a kinship-type structure that allows equal space for little and big dogs alike.

“There is some sort of respect on people that people who break stories,” he said. “They link to you, you link to them back.”