Leaderboard for week of 6-1-2006: Collaborative podcast edition

This week’s leaderboard focuses on collaboration between news organizations to create new products.

Podcasting is becoming a more popular medium, and more news organizations are partaking in it. Podcasts are often recorded live with a live user chat along side them. Podcasts make both good live interactive events for journalists and users, while also making good mobile content later on.

Collaboration is helping to make podcasts and journalism better. Sometimes one news organization or reporter is not enough to properly cover a story or produce a feature. That’s where collaboration comes in.

We are looking at a few podcasts that would not have been possible if news organizations weren’t willing to collaborate.

Politics As Usual | The Morning Call

• While this politics podcast is officially hosted by The Morning Call, it is actually a collaboration between three journalists from three different news organizations, from three different mediums. The Morning Call’s John Micek brings the print prospective, while Politics PA’s Alex Roarty brings the Web perspective and Scott Detrow of Public Radio Capital News brings the broadcast perspective.
• What makes this podcast special? It features three different political reporters from three different news organizations getting together to discuss local Pennsylvanian politics. This is the kind of mash up of news organizations and mediums that we didn’t see a few  years ago. Thankfully this kind of collaboration is becoming more common.
• This is a lively, fun and informative podcast that helps make local politics more accessible to the average Pa. resident. The three discuss recent political news and what they have been hearing behind the scenes, while also giving their expert opinions on a variety of topics.
• None of these organizations could do a podcast like this themselves. They simply don’t have enough knowledgeable employees on hand to have a politics round table. By collaborating with other news organizations, they have been able to create a new product that helps serve users.
• I asked Roarty if he or his bosses were concerned about working with the “competition” and he said the old ways of thinking of other news organizations as competitors no longer apply. “I think the idea is, on the Web, there’s room enough for all of us,” he said.

Previewing Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals | Cleveland.com

• Cleveland.com had a podcast with a beat writers covering the Cavs and Magic for game five of the Eastern Conference Finals. In order to make this happen, Cleveland.com got beat reporters Brian Windhorst from The Plain Dealer and Brian Schmitz from the Orlando Sentinel on the phone together.
• Cleveland.com’s host asked their opinions on the series up to that point, their opinions on certain calls and situations in the series and their thoughts on the series moving forward. Schmitz and Windhorst are two the most knowledgeable people around about these two teams. Cleveland.com does weekly chats with Windhorst, and he frequently puts his knowledge of the Cavs on display and helps answer reader questions, but adding in an expert on the Orlando Magic took this podcast to a higher level.
• Not only is this kind of collaboration rare, but getting together around an event like a playoff series is even rarer. But it just makes sense. By working together, they were able to create a better product.
• Combine this concept with Cleveland.com’s chat room that allows fans to ask questions, and I think you have an absolute winner. Cleveland.com normally has a live chat room during its podcasts where users can ask questions. Since this wasn’t a regularly scheduled podcast there was no chat room.

Why did DISD’s ratings go sky high? | Tawnell Hobbs

• Hobbs is asking her readers to help her get to the bottom of a story. She is wondering why the DISD is projecting a record number of exemplary and recognized schools. Her readers are helping to get to the bottom of this story. Did students really improve that much or is something else at work here?
• Users are chiming in, helping to clarify the situation. Some are posting links to district documents as well.
• The DISD Blog has a lot of district insider’s reading it. They have been a big help to the bloggers covering the beat because they are often able to clarify district policies and provide documents.
• Not only are a lot of facts, figures and information being posted on this blog post, but there is also a healthy discussion about the standardized tests in question. Are they any good? Is what the state considers “acceptable” really acceptable? This is the kind of thoughtful debate that is possible with a good beatblog and a blogger who is willing to take ownership of the comments on her blog.

Leaderboard for week of 5-11-2009: No blog required edition

This week’s Leaderboard features three distinct examples of innovation in beat reporting, because there is no one way to innovate when it comes to reporting.

Our first nominee shows that beat reporters don’t need a blog to be social and interact with people. The comments after news stories provide an excellent place for two-way communication and conversations to happen. While the other two nominees spur conversations through beatblogs, the first nominee is bringing two-way communication to his stories.

It’s important to note that there is no one way to go about beatblogging. Beatblogging can happen on a social network like Twitter or on a blog or in the comments after a news story. The keys to beatblogging are two-way communication, accessibility and transparency.

Robert Schoenberger | The Plain Dealer

• First I need to make it clear that this is a newspaper story, not a blog post. Reporters don’t need a blog to engage in two-way communication. The comments section after their stories will do just fine.
• Schoenberger wrote a story about UAW rallies in downtown Cleveland, where workers called on Washington to protect GM and Chrysler plants in the area. The story drew heated comments on both sides, because of the contentious nature of this issue. Many commenters don’t believe the auto industry should be singled out for a bailout, while other industries sink.
• The Plain Dealer recently called on reporters to interact more, and this story shows why interaction can help make a better product. Schoenberger enters the comments and provides additional facts and figures. His presence helped make the comments less volatile, despite this being a topic with passionate people on both sides. Most of all, however, he helped make better journalism by directly responding to claims made by commenters.
• Some commenters brought up how many foreign cars are actually made in the U.S., including some made in Ohio. Schoenberger stepped in to provide some exact figures, “So far this year, Toyota has imported from Japan about 41 percent of the cars it sells here. Honda imported about 19 percent of its cars (Nissan’s been at about the 20 percent import range for years, but it doesn’t break down its numbers as cleanly).”
• To another commenter, Schoenberger explained why resale values of Big 3 automakers are lowers, “For years, Ford, GM and Chrysler produced more vehicles than they could profitably sell, and they dumped the rest on the rental fleet market. So, 6-18 months after the rental companies got those cheap cars, they would dump them on the used market. That created a huge supply of slightly used Big Three cars, and as an economist can tell you, when supply goes up, prices go down. Honda especially has protected its resale prices by keeping production in line with demand. That’s why their resale values are better than Toyota’s. On the Big Three side, the companies slashed fleet sales about two years ago, and their residual values are climbing. But it’s going to take years (and an improvement in car sales) to undo the damage.”
• When you look at this story, and the subsequent comments, you can see how the comments really forwarded the debate along and created a story of its own. The main story itself was about a few small rallies in the Cleveland area. That’s not exactly big news or something that would usually drive a lot of traffic. However, Schoenberger and commenters turned this story into a a larger debate about domestic automakers. That’s really where this story got interesting, and Schoenberger did a big service to PD readers by weighing in with additional facts and figures.

Andrew C. Revkin | The New York Times

• This is an excellent example of using a blog to tie multiple pieces of content together into a package. In one blog post Revkin links to and embeds content from nytimes.com, NYT blogs, YouTube, books.google.com and Times Topic pages. He takes this disparate content and combines it together to make a post about what happens to garbage and how waste effects rich and poor countries and people differently.
• This post itself doesn’t include original reporting, but it does two things: It gets people thinking of these desperate pieces of content — many from the Times itself — as a package of like-minded stories, and it gets a conversation going about the subject. Blogs excel at conversation and seemingly simple posts like this can be great conversations starters — and traffic creators.
• The other thing this post does is bring attention to older content that is still relevant. Not all this content was created the same day, but it was all relevant at the time of the post. Revkin wrote a nice post that tied all the content together and explained why people should care. In doing so, he brought new life to some older NYT content.
• All the content Revkin linked to told a smaller story, but placed together, it tells a much larger and complete story.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• Levinthal gets a nod this week not for a singular action, but for his complete coverage of the recent local elections in Dallas.
• As the election day went on, Levinthal began filling reports on the voter turnout, early vote returns, analysis of how the big vote was going on the Dallas Convention Center hotel proposition, live reports from the Vote No Dallas! party and the results of the big vote. Levinthal also had a post on why he believes Major Tom Leppert was able to win the proposition 1 vote.
• Levithal followed up this terrific election day coverage with a live chat a day later to discuss the election results and what they mean. Levinthal showed how local elections can be covered with new depth and fervor with a good beatblog. Not only did he provide great covering as events broke, but he also provided strong analysis. This combination of news and analysis is hard to beat. This is the kind of coverage that shows how journalism can be better on the Web.