Pitching this to a new group of sources will be a bit more difficult. Brad doesn’t have the luxuery of already having a lot of sources - which he did when he launched the first Google Group. But he wants to use his early success to pitch it to new sources - to show what is possible and the benefits of being connected with other people who are living and breathing higher education finances.

Kent Fisher from the Dallas Morning News is having some early network success. In a recent email Fisher writes "a growing
group of concerned citizens has “taken over” the comments section
of our posts on the closing of some magnet programs at Skyline High, and are
using the blog to post ideas for fixes and to rally support. Not unlike the
real-time Digg revolt you blogged about"

The timing of Kent’s email was right on time, as I was in the middle of editing a conversation I had with Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor for interactive at the Dallas Morning News to talk about his view of the project as a multi-media editor. That conversation is below.

So, what do you make of the beat blogging project so far?

I’m really pleased what we are doing out of the gate. Our team has really embraced this idea as fully as they can. They’ve come up with some good first efforts.

I don’t know if what we are breaking on the blog is a story that we would have otherwise had or if the fact that we had the blog made this story ours to break.

But thats where the next level of this is: Are we able to really create and act as leaders of a community. I’m not sure if we are there yet. We had talked about having members of the community, non staff members, even be part of our blog effort.

I’m really letting them drive it — whether they have plans to deputize friends of the beat or create blog sub-channels where colleagues or experts and teachers from the public can blog — I don’t know.

We seem to have engaged our audience, the question is, do we want to go to that next level? Do we want to leverage that community as sources? Thats where the experience and support of the beatblogging.org folks will really help.

What you could do [Anthony is talking to me now] is foster group conference calls, where we critically asses other people’s efforts. Thats where I hope we can push each other.

[My response: Absolutely. That is going to be the next big step we all do as a loose affiliate of organizations].

What’s the set-up right now and how can we add to it?

Kent can blog himself, we are using Moveable type. Kent doesn’t do template work, that is done with our interactive operations team. It’s not an instant thing. He does have some support from some of my staff who do a little more, they can do some more aggressive work on the blog itself but essentally if we wanted to add modules of funtionality or incorporate it into a different fashion, that would take the work of interactive operations folks.

Even if you can do it yourself, you have to go through the proper channels. We are like any other larger organization in that sense.

That is a source of frustration for some of our newsroom staff, but we have an enterprise class business that we run - as a result you can’t do anything and everything we want to do.

What about on third party sites?

Kent wanted to create a Facebook page, which is terrific. I have no problem with that.

Do you have any concerns moving ahead?

My biggest concern is that we will be too hesitant, we won’t take enough risk and won’t go enough on the edge. My other big worry is that we will focus on technology and not on community building. The social networking technology is second, what Facebook has is fine, Dallas doesn’t need to build that, we need to build community.

There is a natural tension there with folks who want to create technology that already exists elsewhere on the internet but bring it back on our site and hope that will solve the issue.

Its about reporting in a new and different way — I want them to be aggressive about that. I don’t want to push them, but I would love it if we deputized people in the community to cover areas of our school district because they were experts in it, and we had a page where we could introduce those people.

Thats more like being an editor — and doing it in a public way.

Thanks to Ryan Sholin I was introduced to Matt King, a reporter in Warwick Florida Warwick, NY (thanks Ryan, and Yoni) who has started his own beat blogging project. Like three of our beat bloggers Matt has decided to use Ning to set up his own social network.

His beat is closest to Daniel Victor’s, at the Patriot-News, covering the issues of a small town. Matt is doing this experiment on his own, so if you have any advice for him - I’m sure he is all ears.

I applaud his honesty and insight in the following, edited, conversation.

How did you get started?
I launched my projects this week, mostly by e-mailing the blog and social network links to 150 or so sources. The blog is  and and the ning site is. Five people
have joined the network and I’ve sent them messages asking them to
enlist friends and colleagues.

So what are your initial thoughts about beat blogging?
I envision the network as a way for me to float stories I’m
working on, ask for feedback, hear what people want covered, work my
way into some corners and crannies, etc. I’m going to reach out to some
high school kids I know, try to set something up school-wise.

But here’s the thing with social networks. Either I have to
persuade a lot of people who know nothing about them to join up and use
it, or, with the kids, find a reason for them to use mine when they
probably already belong to two or seven others.

As I mentioned last time, I don’t cover a tech-hungry area. I
don’t know the exact demographics of our readership, but I’m under the
impression that,  even more than most papers, we have an audience full
of, what’s the best euphemism, never adopters. I combed my beat for
Tweeters and found one. The first post after I followed her was an announcement of her impending move to Albany.

When I came across beatblogging.org  I was sad to not be
covering education at the Santa Cruz Sentinel anymore. I miss the beat and it strikes me as the perfect
habitat to beatblog and social network in.

I have serious doubts about getting it to work here (I cover a
multitude of little and littler municipalities with an older population
and my paper is generally regarded as a print product). I’ve found no
hits on Twitter; one of my villages doesn’t even have a Web site and a
school superintendent last night asked me "what’s a blog?"

Doing this without support?

I’m doing what I’m doing on my own (though
my boss knows about it) and flying 80 percent blind. I’m now trying to
manage a social network, but I’ve never used one. Not having my project
tied directly to my paper’s site has already raised about a million
logistical problems, and a reader I reached out to described this as
"not kosher."

Ideas for the future?
I think with a lot of updates, good reporting, doing more of
the little community things online I’d never write about in the paper,
I can drive readership and participation, especially if I can build a
good pipeline for people to post news than I can then report on more
fully.

I guess the theory is a lot of extra work upfront for weeks
and months will pay off with a lot of citizen participation and ease my
burden. My communities will get more coverage and I’ll be so well
educated my reporting will improve dramatically and I’ll have time to
do bigger-picture stuff. But sometimes I feel like I’m paying more
attention to bell and whistles than I am to reporting (which to me is
the great untalked about issue in journalism - seems too many people
think delivery method is all that matters now).

Biggest problems/issue?
Not doing this on my paper’s site
has raised a batch of problems. If I break news on my blog (and I’m
talking small news, turns of the wheel, nothing my paper would post
immediately) I can’t link to my paper’s site bc there’s nothing there.
I’m asking readers to visit multiple sites to get their local news and
when I start getting 15,000 hits a day and ask for a 25 percent raise,
my editors may claim its my personal musings that drawing traffic, not
my work product.

Although not necessarily revolutionary, a recent Dallas Morning News blog post received an incredible amount of traction in the comments. Considering the blog launched only a week earlier, it just goes to show: When journalists open up and ask for for help, people are ready to pitch in.

So the next question is, how can Kent take this momentum to improve his reporting.

The post in question: "Dallas ISD (independent school district) teacher reps will ask school trustees today to eliminate a
district policy that prevents teachers from giving grades lower than a
50." (Check out the comments).

So how did this happen and what is Kent up to next with his beat blogging efforts?

From Kent:

Honestly, I was
winging it because I didn’t expect the reaction it got. I did nothing to
solicit the comments at all. Just published the original blog post.

I can’t
say that the blog comments “helped inform” the print product yet –
but they did result in some good ideas for follow-up, and clearly the teachers
appreciated the dialogue that erupted on the blog site, as evidence by the
comment left by Aimee at 1:17 PM Fri, Jan 18.

I have “assigned” the network a task
(asked them to examine some district-generated school evaluations for me) but
so far only about a third of the participants replied/responded. So that’s
still very much a work-in-progress.

For now Kent’s network is organized via email. If you are interested in joining, contact me and I’ll introduce you.

The first beat blogger out of the gate with an active social network has been Brad Wolverton from the
Chronicle of Higher Education.

He set up a Google Group invited some of his most trusted sources and so far has 46 members that have joined. Google Groups (or Yahoo Groups) are brilliant in their simplicity. While it lacks some of the bells and whistles of a Facebook page, which can be more personal, the conversation is taken right to where people already are: Their e-mail inbox!

My public advice to Brad, which comes from some of the lessons from reporters: Find a way to keep the group engaged. A Google Group (like all social networks) is a shark - if it stops moving forward, it can die. Perhaps build a new page, an overlooked function of Google Groups, and use that to collect a few surveys you would like the social network to take.

The update from Brad:

Things are going really well. I’ve used the group several times to
help my reporting on stories, so it’s already been very successful in
my mind. I’ve also gotten a handful of people to raise discussion
topics on their own. And I just ran into probably 20 of the members at
a conference this past weekend, and they all appreciated being invited
and have enjoyed the level of conversation. I see this as a great
legacy for the beat I’m covering (meaning that I’m sure it will live on
after I’m gone), and I’m planning to suggest that more reporters around
here set up discussion groups to help their reporting.

Google
Groups is working OK. I don’t think the people in my crowd are
necessarily the kind to spend much time beyond the intellectual banter
getting to know other people online, so the technology isn’t getting in
the way of things. But I was disappointed with some of the problems I
had in setting up the group. I think I mentioned that Google flagged a
bunch of my invitations as possible spam, and I had to add people
directly. Those folks haven’t been able to access the website where the
conversation threads are archived unless they’re gmail users.