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 or her core job — reporting.

Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News estimates that he used to spend upwards of 80% of his time getting those quotes to appease his editors for the print edition. His blog and beat are on the Dallas Independent School District, and his editors always wanted a parent’s voice or some other readers thoughts in his stories.

Fischer called that kind of reporting "contrived." He had to fish around for quotes from random people, which would often eat up precious hours of his day that he could have used to report on more topics. With his blog, people organically leave comments — often very good comments. Fischer created this graphic to explain how reporting is traditionally done in print versus the outsourcing that blogs allow:

Now he blogs about the core story — the nut graph of information that people are really interested in, complete with links to outside resources and data (the kind of deep context that print never could provide). And if his users really care about a topic, they’ll leave comments. He often gets 80 comments a day on his blog, many of which are from dedicated readers.

"I’m outsourcing that stuff to my readers," Fischer said about all parts of a story that readers traditional provided anyway.

People know how to share opinions, and Fischer’s blog gives them a venue to do just that. In addition, comments on a blog aren’t static like quotes in a newspaper. Fischer interacts with his readers, and his readers interact with each other.

His blog has become a community, a social network for people who really care about the school district in Dallas.

As you can see from the graphic Fischer made, the majority of his reporting was spent on content that can be outsourced to readers, usually with better results. Fischer also spent a disproportional amount of time getting these quotes from readers.

"Man on the street is a waste of time," Fischer said about asking random people to comment on stories. "Readers know it is too."

Fischer, however, does have to spend a lot of time maintaining the comments on his blog. The software his paper uses does not automatically approve comments, but rather requires Fischer to approve every single comment before it goes love.

There are several ways to combat this problem. A Web site could allow all comments to go live, except those that get flagged by an automated system for suspected issues (spam, vulgarity, etc). This system works well when combined with a way for users to flag comments as inappropriate. If a comment gets flagged too many times, it is sent to a queue for the blogger to make a final determination on its merits.

Another option is to require all users to register before posting. Most spammers, trolls and other malcontents will not bother to register. The negative of this option is that many benign readers won’t bother to register either.

Another, decidedly more expensive option, is to hire people whose sole job is to approve comments. This can work, especially at larger organizations with lots of comments to sort through, but is obviously expensive.

No option is perfect, but the situation that Fischer faces is less than idea. His work hopes to automate the process soon, which should free him up to work more on producing content. Right now, Fischer finds himself approving comments at all hours of the day, including while he is at home.

The last major drawback that Fischer has run into with comments on his blog is the print edition. He still writes for the print edition, and his editors have asked him to try to repurpose a blog post and its comments for the print edition.

That often isn’t possible. Fischer refuses to use anonymous sources in his stories, and many of the people who leave comments on his blog do so under pseudonyms. He would have to spend untold amounts of time trying to track down the authors of the comments to get them to comment for the print edition. Just as content originally meant for print often doesn’t work well online, the opposite is also true.

Fischer has enjoyed blogging his beat and believes it has allowed him to cover his beat better. He is hoping that he’ll eventually be a full-time beat blogger, instead of splitting his time between print and the Web.