Via the Exploding Newsroom. Hat tip Patrick Thornton.

Thanks to the hard work of Hassan Hodges, we launched a redesign and a few upgrades at our pharmaceutical industry news site Pharmalot
over the weekend. The changes focused on a few key areas, and they were
geared toward improving the overall experience for the site’s growing
community of users:

Connections
>Promotion for Pharmalot’s Facebook page.
>Prominent links to Pharmalot’s Twitter stream, RSS feeds, and email subscriptions.

Search engine optimization
>Reduced duplicate content.
>Better search terms to organize content.
>Better content in those oh-so-important H1 and H2 fields.

Performance
>Reduced homepage HTML size from 67KB to 46KB.
>15% fewer requests for external files.
>25% fewer database calls to generate a page.
>Total homepage load reduced from 266KB to 188KB.
>Total load time cut in half from 3.7 to 1.9 seconds. Individual
results will vary, but we’re processing fewer components on the back
end and serving everything in a leaner way.

Printing
>Better support for printing pages via a print stylesheet. (This was our most requested new feature.)

We’ll keep rolling out improvements and responding to suggestions
from users. If you have any thoughts about how we can make the site
better, please drop a line here or in the comments below. You can also see the archived Cover It Live chat Hassan held today with users on the site. And of course Ed Silverman, the grand poobah of Pharmalot, always welcomes your input.

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.

Their first Tweet is a call to action: Should Pfizer Dump Dr. Jarvik? Tell Us

The related blog post has 34 comments.

At this point it’s safe to say that Twitter has played little role in getting any of those comments: The Pharmalot Twitter is only following 14 people and all are fellow journalists.

But Ed Silverman has the right idea - that’s a good way to use Twitter. Next he needs to find out if people in the Pharma industry are also using Twitter and start reaching out to them.

UPDATE

In a blog post today

Question: Should Pfizer Get Rid of Dr. Jarvik?

Yes - 218 votes, or 69 percent;
No -    98 votes, or 31 percent.

Number of respondents - 316

Ed is creating a live social network of 316 people. By the act of letting others know where they fit in - they are getting a sense of who the others are. This is just one small step in that direction - obviously the 316 respondents are strangers to each other still, but one can see how continuing to do quick hits like this bring value to the reader and create a sense of community.

Ed Silverman, editor of Pharmalot has the luxury of working only online. But don’t think that means he slacks off. One look at the blog and you’ll realize that Ed is "a machine," as his editor John Hassell noted.

John and Ed are looking into different ways to utilize social bookmarking sites or social news sites to tap into the wisdom of the crowd that has grown around Ed’s blog. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

So what do you want to accomplish?

Ed has been blogging for a little over a year,  Pharamlot just had its birthday, and in many ways he has approached doing this with a lot of the same thoughts that are driving the beat blogging project. He wanted this to be a collaborative experience and to develop relationships with his sources.

It seems to us that there are other opportunities, using various new technology platforms and services to find other ways for Ed to connect with other sources. He would be the first person to tell you it’s the wisdom of the crowd around him that makes the blog work. The question is, how do you take that to the next level?

What are the realities you face in the newsroom?

Ed is covering an industry in and around people in the industry. The trick is to have a relatioship with sources, understanding that many people in any industry are not always free to speak publicly about what they know or think. So how do you harness the wisdom of the crowd that can’t always speak publicly to other members of the crowd? That’s what we have been wrestling with.

Step one to go in that direction is to come up with some kind of a network of people who know this stuff inside and out who can share what they consider important — either by name or not.

We will also set up a Twitter feed of headlines from Pharmalot and Ed will interact with readers that way.

I’m not sure that we need a full social network. I don’t want to be closed off to doing a full fledged site if it makes sense, but at the moment I don’t see that as the best way to approach this. Between the RSS feed and emails Ed has a long list of sources and people he can tap and direct at any time, so the network is there. He has the ability to throw questions out there and get responses.

The really simple thing to do is get a group of 30 people and put them in a forum, but I don’t want to do that.

We want to give readers access to what some group of knowledgeable people believe to be important at any moment of time - and we are looking at various tools in the social recommendation, social bookmarking realm to accomplish that and we are hoping to move on that soon.

What is the technical support like?
Whatever we decide to do with the blog we can do. Pharmalot is hosted externally, we do all the design and development. It’s really one guy who does it all - and works closely with Ed.

As soon as we are ready to something — it will happen really quick. If we were doing this on another project we might not have that same flexblity or freedom - but we are very lucky.

A continuation of our update posts: See updates on the first four reporters here

Read the rest of this entry »

The Beat: Pharmalot - covering all aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, from corporate earnings to drug trials to marketing strategy.

The Editor: Ed Silverman, editor of the Pharamlot blog.

Description: John Hassell, deputy managing editor/online writes…

We’re in.

As you know, Ed Silverman has been covering the pharmaceutical
industry as a full-time blogger at Pharmalot.com for almost a year now.
We recently partnered with Daylife.com to expand the site with
aggregated news content.

Pharmalot already has a loyal, growing and highly engaged audience,
and we’re excited about finding ways to expand that audience and
involve more people in the collection and distribution of news about
the industry.

A social network built around Ed’s reporting fits perfectly with those goals.

The Newark Star Ledger Team: (1. John Hassell, deputy managing editor/online
(2. TJ Foderaro, deputy business editor
(3. Ed Silverman, editor, Pharmalot.com