We're switching to WordPress this week from TypePad.
While this does mean BeatBlogging.Org will be getting more features and a much more powerful platform, it also means it will have some interruptions and hiccups this week. We have a new, custom WordPress theme we're launching. We're adding new features and switching [...]
Why should you or your news organization start beat blogging?
This question becomes even more poignant if you work for a smaller news organization with limited resources. What are the benefits of beat blogging? We've been chronicling the benefits of beat blogging for months on this site, but we don't have [...]
Brian Stelter has been blogging and pushing the new media envelope much longer than he has been working at a mainstream publication, but now be combines new media with old to cover his beat.
Before coming to The New York Times, Stelter founded and ran the popular and influential TV [...]
Khristopher Brooks uses Facebook and other social networks to help him report and find people to interview.
Brooks works on an education beat, which is particularly well suited to social networking. In fact, he has found that Facebook allows him to report certain stories much easier and quicker than in [...]
Khristopher Brooks has been using Facebook and MySpace longer than he has been a professional reporter, so it naturally made sense for him to use social networks for his job when he became a full-time reporter two years ago.
Brooks is an education reporter for the Omaha World-Herald. He is [...]
Forum Communications Zac Echola said the only way to deal with comments is to get your hands dirty.
By that he means you have to interact with the public, but that doesn't necessarily mean spending large amounts of time on comment moderation. I've found by interviewing different people that beat [...]
We're in the process of redesigning BeatBlogging.Org with a new design that will better mesh with our goals for the project moving forward.
This is your chance to provide feedback. What do you like about BeatBlogging.Org? What do you dislike?
What features would you like to see? What kinds of content appeal [...]
Watch NYU's PressThinker Jay Rosen describe what beat blogging is all about as he answers the question, what would you do if you were a print reporter today?
Rosen talks about how not only is content important but also connections. That's a key part of beat blogging. Beat blogging is [...]
Easily one of the biggest negatives of comments on blogs and Web sites is the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that is spouted off by users that is intended to confuse or deceive fellow users.
FUD is not always malicious, but it is usually spread by people who are strongly [...]
Kent Fischer, an education blogger for The Dallas Morning News, has scored multiple A1 stories and hundreds of blog comments because some of his readers alerted him to new grading policies for the Dallas Independent School District.
At first, Fischer didn't think the new policies were a big story, [...]
Kent Fischer's blog posts about the Dallas Independent School District relaxing its grading policies were called into question by a district spokesman on another blog.
Fischer's blog posts and A1 stories about DISD lowering its standards has caused an outcry among teachers, parents and the general public. It [...]
Web content analytics give content creators an unprecedented look at what people like and which content garners the most traffic.
With Web analytics, content creators like writers, bloggers, photographers, database developers, etc can find out which content is getting the most page views and visits and from where those visitors [...]
Kent Fischer of The Dallas Morning News received an e-mail on Monday from a teacher about new district grading policies for Dallas.
At first, Fischer didn't think it was a big story, but he made a blog post about it anyway, asking readers what the impact of the [...]
Timing has been good to Jon Ortiz.
The Sacramento Bee had originally planned to launch his blog about California state workers later, but realized that it would be wise to capitalize on the state budget impasse between Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature. That fateful decision instantly made The State Worker [...]
The practice of hoisting comments is beginning to catch on with more beat bloggers.
Education Week's Eduwonkette blog has launched its own comment of the week feature called the COWAbunga Award. The feature was inspired by one of the beat bloggers we're following, Kent Fischer. This week, Eduwonkette [...]
Content isn't everything.
Timing is important too. Jon Ortiz and The Sacramento Bee recently launched a new beat blog ahead of schedule, The State Worker, because Governor Schwarzenegger announced he would fire some state works and reduce the pay of the rest unless he was handed a new state budget. [...]
Matt Neznanski started a new beat blog -- his second -- a few months ago, but hasn't found the success he was looking for.
His latest beat blog, Green City, is on sustainable living in Corvallis, Oregon. He wants to make this a community project, because it was the [...]
Not all users are created equal.
Some users know more than a reporter does about a given subject. In a traditional media world that wisdom would largely go unused. But innovative beat bloggers like Eric Berger, and his employer the Houston Chronicle, have found ways to harness the wisdom of [...]
This is the second part of my interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Monica Guzman. Part 1 was about cultivating conversations.
This time Guzman and I are talking about newsroom culture. She thinks many young journalists are looking for the door, especially in the Seattle area.
Seattle is filled with tech [...]
We've been talking about ways to cultivating conversations and communities lately.
Monica Guzman, the first online reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has yet another way to get the conversation going. She analyzes previous comments that posters have made to spot trends. She then makes posts about them, [...]
"Despite what might happen to our industry, despite what form it will take, despite the business model, people will always want to know what is going on and will always want to have an intelligent conversation. They just need to be empowered to do so."
For Monica Guzman, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's [...]
Sorry Gawker, but you're dead wrong that newspapers should stop allowing people to comment on stories.
Really, really wrong.
Comments add value to Web sites, they drive traffic and build communities. The problem with most newspaper Web sites is that they are comment ghettos -- sections of Web sites that are [...]
I watched this 55-minute talk with Chris Anderson over at Media Bistro in hopes of figuring out if the video was worth your time and money.
Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and the author of The Long Tail. It's certainly worth your time to [...]
Kent Fischer has begun allowing guest bloggers on his beat blog for the Dallas Independent School District.
Fischer is hoping that these guest bloggers can help keep the conversation going during the slow summer months on his blog. The guest bloggers have gotten off to a strong start so [...]
Last week, I wrote about hoisting comments, and how it can be a community building tool.
Kent Fischer, one of the beat bloggers who had already hoisted comments, has launched a new weekly feature, "Comment of the Week," dedicated to the best comment of the previous week:
We're starting a [...]
Kent Fischer, and education blogger for The Dallas Morning News, wants to build a "blog on steroids."
In just six months, he has become a successful beat blogger with thousands of page views each day and plenty of comments from dedicated users. Now he realizes that he must take his [...]
Hoisting comments is a basic technique of beat blogging that involves highlighting the best user comments and bringing them above the fray.
Berkeley Economist Brad DeLong was one of the first to use the term to describe highlighting user comments. His hoisted comments often inspire users to comment even more, [...]
Hot off the heels of his last popular online-survey efforts, the SciGuy Eric Berger has come up with another online survey that will probably be wildly popular -- and cause quite a stir.
Last time Berger asked his readers for their thoughts on science and religion. Now he wants [...]
So, you have a successful beat blog with a strong community and great two-way communication.
There is nothing more you can do to increase community involvement. Right? Several beat bloggers and news outlets would beg to differ. Some journalists are trying to take community involvement to the next level by allowing [...]
Eric Berger, the SciGuy over at the Houston Chronicle, has had success building a blog with a strong community around it.
Building a community requires hard work and dedication. It takes a blogger who embraces two-way communication. Just writing print stories online won't build a community, but it doesn't [...]
A lot of journalists are being asked to do more in the same amount of time.
More stories, more blogging, more social networking, more video, etc. Brianne Pruitt posted on Wired Journalists about her paper's blogging and innovation woes:
Our bloggers are still expected to create the same amount of content [...]
Eric Berger, the SciGuy, has a thriving community on his blog, with regular users, but he is always looking for ways to build a stronger community.
Berger, a beat reporter for the Houston Chronicle, often asks for users' input and uses his blog to build a community around his beat. I [...]
The Listening Post, Wired's multi-author music blog, joined Twitter a few days ago and promises to use Twitter to deliver micro-posts of information to music fans:
Hope you are having a hot holiday, party people. And since you probably are, and far too busy to get deep with Listening [...]
In my last post, I noted that Daniel Victor is moving on from his Ning network for his beat.
His experience setting up a social network for his beat hasn't gone that well, but Victor is not giving up on using social and Web tools for his beat. This is [...]
One of the original 13 beat bloggers, Daniel Victor, is stepping away from his Ning social network that he built for his beat because of a lack of participation.
Ning is a service that allows people to set up their own social networks on any topic. Victor called [...]
Ed Silverman discusses the transition from being a beat reporter in print to running the online site Pharmalot.
Silverman has been blogging his beat over at Pharmalot.com for about 18 months and has enjoyed considerable success. For him, moving his beat to the Web was a question of when, [...]
Not every post a beat reporter makes needs to be just about news or facts.
Some posts simply serve to be conversation starters -- to engage the community. After all, one of the major differences between beat reporting on the Web, instead of in print, is the community that forms [...]
Pharmalot has been a successful blog when measured by any metric -- Web traffic, content and financially -- according to John Hassell, online editor for The Star-Ledger.
Its success, in many ways, can be attributed to its ability to hone in on a niche. It's not a [...]
When is it OK to use online comments left in the comment sections of news stories, blogs or forums in the print edition?
That depends on who you ask.
Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News does not use comments left on his blog in his print stories, because he and [...]
When writing for the print edition, reporters often have to spend large amounts of time getting "man on the street" quotes from random people to flush out stories.
Not with blogging. That's what the comment section of each blog post is for. That frees up a reporter to focus on his [...]
BeatBlogging.org now has a Twitter account, @BeatBlogging.
Our Twitter account will have a lot of information that isn't found here: links to good examples of beat blogging every time we find them, discussions of people pushing the practice, previews of posts that we'll be making and more.
This account is [...]
Beat blogging is all about making journalism better.
That's why I'm here.
What we're ultimately looking to do is to help people transition into the next phase of journalism. We believe the networked journalism principles are a big part of that. Journalism has always had a captive audience, but we're finally [...]
We are six months into this project and we expect another six before we are done.
As I've said before, I am not leaving Beat Blogging, but I do have another project which will keep me busy.
But I am pleased to know that Patrick Thornton is officially [...]
From Daniel Victor's personal blog.
"I love the beatblogging project because it’s innovation in real newsroom laboratories, as opposed to tsk-tsking and dreaming.
My foray into it has had its ups and downs, but I recently had a kind of success story that I didn’t expect when I signed [...]
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Harrisonburg is a small Virginia city with a population of less than 50,000. The town wasn’t exactly Happenstance until Brent Finnegan decided to liven things up by supplementing his alternative newsblog, 
The unveiling of Google?s new ?
