Beat Blogging

The Business of Beat Blogging: My Next Endeavor. Community Building Remains Essential and Will Continue to be Our Focus

I will be working on a new project at Spot Us. In many ways it is complimentary to beat blogging. The idea is to create a social network that funds independent journalists through micro-donations.
More details on my personal blog.

What does this mean for beat blogging?

• I am not going to disappear, although I will take a bit of a back seat to.....(coming soon)
• We have another very talented journalist who is going to come in and pick up some slack.

What to expect?

More affiliate beat bloggers: Yes... more more and more. Creating a vibrant network around a beat isn't a science - but there are best practices and we will continue to find reporters who are actively working on developing and perfecting them.

Tomorrow's post, for example, will be an interview with Matt Neznanski - a reporter who has built (emphasis on already built) a network that aids his reporting on city politics and business. Stay tuned.

Our 13 guinea-pig reporters are still going to try and make headway learning from the practices we set out.

Start Beat Blogging in Minutes with Google Friend Connect

The excuses for not beat blogging are becoming harder and harder to swallow. Don't have the technical tools? Not enough time to alter your website?

Tonight Google released Friend connect.

When I first learned about OpenSocial I talked about it with the 13 beat bloggers quickly and said: "you probably won't need to worry about OpenSocial, right now it's just for developers and we won't see a practical application for about one year."

I will now take off my hat and tip it towards Google and then proceed to eat it. They managed to get a practical application of OpenSocial in seven months. Bad news for Facebook, good news for beat blogging.

A Follow-up to Seesmic

My last post was about Seesmic, a new tool that I continue to think has potential for beat blogging.

I highlighted a thread started by Paul Bradshaw - and it has yielded some fruit.

John Hassell at the Star Ledger notes the potential Seesmic has for columnists in his own Seesmic video and also gets the chance to respond to a reader in a follow up video.

Obviously journalists can do video responses to EVERY single reader question - but Seesmic is very... echem... seamless. It isn't hard to do several videos a day.

Seesmic - A Social Video Website....for Journalism?

The medium IS the message.  Again, where you get your network is less important than how you manage them - but video is a way to create real connections as Paul from the Online Journalism Blog explains below.

Beat Blogging - An Elevator Pitch

People ask me for a beat blogging elevator pitch. Here's a quick attempt at it.

In this video I talk about.

• What beat blogging is
• The first big obstacle we've noticed
• Rolodex 2.0
• Power of the Posse
• Public versus Private Networks (being the center of conversation versus getting a scoop)

The most important thing to note: ANYONE CAN DO THIS. It takes almost no money. The only barrier is committing your time or as Amy points out: Finding a way to turn turn the network into a tool so that you can get work done through it.

Newspaper Asks Bloggers for Help

clipped from citmedia.org San Jose Mercury News: Wanted: Los Gatos bloggers. We’re looking for community bloggers in Los Gatos who can write about such things as events in town, school fundraisers, the score of the latest football game. We need someone who would love a forum for reflecting on the latest buzz story in town, or even write things to do for runners, kids, moms, retirees or other groups in town. But the very fact that the paper has recognized what has been obvious for years — that the bloggers and others running websites in a community are able to supplement, and in some cases replace, what the newspaper has been doing, or failing to do. But to the extent that the Mercury News is recognizing and helping to promote a wider and more diverse media ecosystem, this is a potentially noteworthy move.

The Real-Deal Beat Blogging

Update: Matt and I are working out when we can do a phone interview to talk about what he's done so far, what has worked and what hasn't. The main point however is still a kudos to him for pushing forward.

Here's an example of a real-deal beat blogger. It looks like a wordpress blog (free) which is aimed to "help me cover your city better. Let's use this blog for a two-way conversation about our community."

I'd love to ask Matt
1. How long it took him to set this up.

My guess - it might have been frustrating for a bit, but if he can turn this into part of his work routine - it will be incredibly beneficial.

Brilliant People: Let's Talk Basketball

Beat blogging can tackle any subject matter. From the New Yorker to ESPN in three moves or less thanks to Henry Abbott

clipped from myespn.go.com Malcolm Gladwell's latest article in the New Yorker is about ideas and inventions. Instead of waiting around for brilliance to arrive, at Intellectual Ventures they put the smart people together in a room and pretty much instruct them to dream up important new things. And guess what: it works! My first thought is: Wow, innovation is available practically whenever we want it. You just have to decide you want to innovate, and then get the smart people together with a tape recorder, food, and an aggressive lawyer. (Actually, read the whole article -- there's plenty more to it, but close enough.) My second thought is: Basketball could use some innovation. If I could put ten really smart people together in a room, a few things I'd want to put on the agenda: I'm sure there a million others. Fire away in the comments. Then maybe we should actually hold this brainstorming session.

Artifacts of Beat Blogging - Emails of Organization

So much of beat blogging is about online organizing - something that isn't taught in journalism schools, but skills that I think all journalists posses. Bethany Or is working on Mashup, a new radio show about what happens when cultures crash together - and she is beat blogging to get sources and work on stories. Interested in brainstorming ideas with her? Email her. Or better yet, add her as a friend on Facebook where she is also doing organizing.

She is beat blogging using both tools - email and Facebook. The Facebook site got 60 members in 2 days. Not bad! And tons of people wrote back to the first mass email she sent - they then became part of the "Inner Circle." She has also been talking with people about it in person and by phone.

In her latest email to her network Bethany writes

Thanks for agreeing to part of what I affectionately call the "Mashup Inner Circle." I'm hoping to use your ears and brains to test out ideas for the show this summer.

 

Things have evolved nicely over the past week and a half and we're now at the stage of DOING - up until now, it has been one massive brainstorm.

 

Here are some of the ideas we've been discussing. Do these interest you? Make sense? Have any ideas of people we need to talk to or angles we need to consider?

• hip hop has evolved beyond just African-American culture and is present on every continent of the world. Lots of people in Canada, whether they be young immigrants, or children of immigrants, end up adopting hip hop as their own. How did this happen? Why?
• Young people who have more conservative immigrant parents might need to hide their relationship from their family. This gets complicated when they start living together ...... you may end up in all sorts of elaborate schemes to hide it. Anyone in this situation? Been in it? Know someone who is?
• anyone know someone who's immigrated to Canada in the last year or so?

I'll leave you with these to chew on .... drop a line, or call. I'll try and compile it all so you can see what others thought about these ideas. Plus, if you have Facebook, drop into my group, Let's make radio with Bethany (you'll see a photo of me holding a radio).

 

Sending my thanks, and a smile,

Bethany

 

Does Your School Have Supplies? Tap A Network of Parents to Find Out

Kent Fischer taps his network to find out if the local school district has the supplies it needs.

A blog post like this might not be suitable for print, but a few of these combined and a beat reporter might have a great feature story.

clipped from dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com We're hearing there seems to be a wee bit of a toilet paper shortage around the district. It's not unusual, as the school year winds down, for schools to run low on supplies. Copy paper, for instance, is at a premium every spring. This year, TP and paper towels are on many most wanted lists. We asked our beatbogging volunteers to check out the situation at their schools. Click the jump to read their dispatches. North Dallas High: Toilet paper ok, but today we don't have copier paper. Townview: It has been reported to me that two weeks ago in one women's restroom in Townview, that no toilet paper was to found.  It was a big restroom, with about 12 stalls. I have also been informed that some stalls are always short of toilet paper. A South east Dallas elementary: We ration toilet paper. Some teachers have brought their own in. What we are woefully low on is paper towels. It's really, really tragic. Our lead custodian tells me that he's been told he doesn't have any more money in his budget.