Monica Guzman has been conducting meetups to connect with readers, build sources and find out what her readers want her and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to cover.

The fate of the PI is very much up in the air, but Guzman and her colleagues are still innovating and pushing the practice. Guzman in particular has been innovative with her work on The Big Blog, and her weekly meetups fit in well with her blogging.

Guzman began doing the meetups so she could get out of the office and meet her readers. Guzman’s job is to be a guide to Seattle and to help spur conversations on the PI’s Web site. A big part of her job is connecting with readers and cultivating conversations on the PI Web site, and it made sense for her to continue that in person.

“The way I thought of it was office hours,” she said. “If the point of my blog and the point of what I’m trying to do as a journalist is to find new ways to connect with people, why not do it in person?”

Guzman patterned her office hours after the weekly office hours that her professors had in college. She wanted a regular space for readers to be able to drop in and say hi. She also wanted to give people a forum to express their thoughts.

“I like that idea of being available often,” she said about why she decided to have the meetups weekly.

An average of about 10 people attend each session. She notifies readers about the meetups on her blog and on Twitter, and the meetups are at different venues around the city to encourage different people to attend. While there are regulars, the varying locations help ensure that the crowd is unique each week.

“The conversation is defined by the people there and what they want to talk about,” she said. ”There is no secret formula.”

Guzman has begun bringing along special guests that her readers are interested in. These special guests can be prominent bloggers and community members that have stories and lessons to share. It’s great if a story comes out of the interaction with her special guests, but it’s not a requirement.

The meetups are casual without a set agenda. She doesn’t generate a story out of each meetup, but story ideas have come out of her interactions with readers. She also has written stories based on what readers say at the meetups.

Ultimately, connecting more with her readers has allowed Guzman to do her job better.

“It absolutely helps me get to know the city better,” she said.

Many journalists would balk at spending time on meetups, fearing that they would be too much effort for too little output. Guzman said she has not run into those problems. In fact, it takes very little effort to get a meetup going with Web tools like blogs and Twitter.

“It’s kind of astonishing how little time and effort it actually takes,” she said. “It just starts with, ‘I’m going to be here.’”

Some other topics discussed:

• What problems has she faced with the meetups?
• How do her editors originally feel about the meetups? How did she convince them to let her work on something that doesn’t always generate content?
• How have her editors and her coworkers’ opinions changed of the meetups?
• Do any of her coworkers also conduct meetups?

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

He’s a multimedia reporter. He’s been a reporter for more than 30 years, and yet he is more innovative and willing to try new things than most journalism students and recent graduates.

“I think it’s something that anyone can use if they’re open to it,” he said about social networking tools. “Throughout my career, I’ve always been looking for new tools. I want to see how people are using different networks to pass information, because my job is to pass information.”

His use of Twitter to cover trials may change how trials are covered in the 21st century. He originally started covering trials on Twitter earlier this year as a what if. What would happen if we covered trials live via Twitter?

“We started this in jury selection because jury selection is one of the most boring parts of a trial,” he said about starting conservatively. “We actually started getting some response.”

Within a few days the American Bar Association’s online journal interviewed him about his use of Twitter. It went from only a few people knowing that he was tweeting to all the judges and lawyers of this trial asking what Twitter was all about.

After that, the Eagle started promoting his Twitter coverage with refers in the paper and by embedding his Twitter feed into various parts of Kansas.com and his blog.

“By the end of the trial we were getting a lot of reaction from readers,” he said. “People said they were sitting at work, refreshing the page over and over again to keep up with the trial.”

In the past, there were only two real ways to get information about a trial. Some judges would allow video cameras in their courtrooms, while others would not. This meant that either people could try to make sense of the hours of live video or they could read about each day’s proceedings after they happened.

“For traditional print, it kind of puts us back in the game,” he said. “It allows us to cover the courts live.”

Now people can follow along on Twitter to find out what is happening during each day of a trial. So, how is this innovative? Many people have told Sylvester that they prefer his tweets to the live television coverage of the current trial he is covering.

Instead of sorting through hours of television coverage, people get succinct 140-character-or-less summaries of what is happening, and people can easily go back and read what he tweeted earlier. Sylvester also provides context that a live feed can’t provide. For instance, he might tweet about what a lawyer is trying to accomplish during cross examination.

“I was giving them summaries, and I was kind of filtering the information for them,” he said. “To lay people, court proceedings can be pretty confusing sometimes, even if you sit and watch the whole thing. I think Twitter puts things into context for people.”

But here is the money question: How does Twitter fit in with Sylvester’s work flow? He produces content for the Web and print. Isn’t Twitter just one more thing for him to do each day?

Twitter makes Sylvester more efficient. He uses his Twitter feed as a rough draft. It’s like a notebook, except better.

“It serves as kind of my notebook, but the notes are in complete sentences,” he said. “It actually makes the filing of the print story quicker.”

This is a must-listen podcast, and this write up does not do the podcast justice. Find out why you should strongly consider using Twitter as a reporting tool.

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