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We're switching blogging platforms

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 hosts and platforms, while transferring all the old posts.

Something will go wrong in the process, but we'll make sure to fix everything. Rest assured, this switch will be well worth it.

If you have any questions about why we are switching blogging platforms, please ask away. We feel WordPress gives us more power and flexibility than TypePad.

For many organizations and projects like BeatBlogging.Org, WordPress can be a powerful CMS that provides a lot of flexibility. And, yes, WordPress and our new hosting will be cheaper than TypePad.

Interview with Brianne Pruitt about starting a beat blog at a smaller publication

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 a lot of examples from smaller publications.

Brianne Pruitt is a Web editor at the Wenatchee World, a 25,000-circulation newspaper in central Washington. Her paper recently launched its first beat blog for its education beat reporter, Rachel Schleif. We'll be following along with this new beat blog to see how a beat blog works at a smaller news organization.

The education beat was chosen because education stories tend to generate some of the most traffic and comments on the World's Web site. Pruitt said it makes sense to try to further tap into that community.

Pruitt and some of her colleagues believe a beat blog can help them build a community, get responses to posts and questions, foster sources and hopefully generate news and information for a beat. Pruitt has been particularly impressed with Kent Fischer's work as an education beat blogger.

She is hoping this beat blog can be like Fischer's where the blog helps cultivate and break stories. The World does not have set metrics to meet each month like page views for this beat blog. The beat blog is more about building a community and innovating and less about just generating traffic.

"We're really hoping for it to develop into an online community of readers, educators and public officials," she said. "We're hoping for it to become a really proactive way for us to report education news around here."

This beat blog just launched, but we'll be checking in to chart its progress. We'll be reporting the trials and tribulations of starting a beat blog at a smaller newspaper.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

Stelter combines old and new media at Times

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 news blog TV Newser. Now that he works for one of the most storied news organizations in the world, Stelter finds himself managing a beat offline and online.

At the center of his beat is TV Decoder, a blog about what's on TV, who is watching what's on TV and why it matters. But Stelter finds himself spending more than half of his time working for print. How does he balance the two and how do they work together?

"When I was first starting, it was a challenge to figure out what is a blog post versus what is a print story," he said.

He said his blog is a way to pitch stories for the paper, and to report out stories for the paper. He can write a short post for his blog and gauge the reaction. He can also spend days, weeks or  even months reporting little tidbits before he puts it all together into a large story for print.

"It's frequently an archive for when I'm writing a story for the paper, so I can go back and use some of the thoughts I had three months ago for a story," he said about his blog.

Stelter has never known a non-wired world of journalism. He can't imagine not be able to use tools like his blog, Twitter or other social networks to help get instant feedback from readers. He really values the connectedness and feedback he gets from being wired.

"I think the big and most general advantage is it kind of makes it easier to share stories, ideas, links and to be able to ask for advice, contacts and sources," he said about being a wired journalists. "When I go on Twitter and post about what I'm writing about, I'm opening myself up to opinions, more points of view and more sources. That's almost always a benefit."

Part of being connected goes beyond getting feedback from users. People like to help and contribute. Stelter said it makes people feel more connected to him as a person, because he is no longer just a byline in a paper, but a real person that they can interact with.

People can interact with Stelter in a myriad of ways. They can post comments on his blog, and he responds to some of those comments, or they can talk to him on Twitter or be his friend on Facebook. Stelter doesn't use social networking at the core of his beat like many beat bloggers do, but rather he uses social networking to allow him to be more connected to his beat.

He hasn't found Facebook to be that helpful of a resource, but he does use it as a directory for contacts. Many of his sources, PR contacts and others are on Facebook. Facebook does give his readers and easy way to contact him, but he hasn't found any meaningful public discourse through Facebook.

"It just seems to me that Facebook isn't the place that conversations are happening," he said. "I would think the conversations are happening on the blog itself in the comments section. I use the comments section sometimes as an incubator for stories."

He has used Twitter mostly as a venue to get instant feedback from users. During the open ceremony of the Olympics he used search.twitter.com to see what people were saying about NBC by just typing in "NBC." He found a lot of people were upset with NBC for delaying the open ceremony 12 hours.

He wrote a blog post about the situation, it was linked from the homepage and the post started to get hundreds of comments. The comments on his blog and on Twitter convinced his editors that this needed to be a print story. Stelter was able to find great synergy between his social networking presence on Twitter and his blog and with print on this story.

"It wound up on the front page of the Times the next day," he said. "A few years ago that simply wouldn't have been possible. I don't think it would have been possible to measure the reaction."

Interview with Khristopher Brooks about using Facebook to help report

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 the past.

"If I had a particular story that really needed student comments, it might take a whole day of walking around Lincoln, Nebraska -- perhaps finding someone, perhaps not," Brooks said. "You would hope so, but if you don't, that's a whole wasted day."

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

Facebook and other social networks can help speed up reporting

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 often writing about higher education institutions like the University of Nebraska. Colleges and universities are home to many students who regularly use social networks for communication. It made sense for Brooks to utilize the same social networks that students were using.

Facebook in particular has allowed Brooks to report certain stories faster and find more students to interview. Using Facebook, he can find students, down to individual majors, for instance. If he needs to talk to a student who is a business administration major, he can go on Facebook and find one, instead of spending hours on campus trying to find students.

"If I had a particular story that really needed student comments, it might take a whole day of walking around Lincoln, Nebraska -- perhaps finding someone, perhaps not," Brooks said. "You would hope so, but if you don't, that's a whole wasted day."

With Facebook, he can sit at his desk, and search for students by major, hometown, sports, activities and other fields. Brooks asked Nebraska for a student e-mail account so he could join the universities network on Facebook. This has allowed him to search through thousands of students profiles.

Without the Nebraska e-mail address, Brooks would be much more limited in the amount of data he could see and search through. For certain stories, this access has been invaluable.

"If I just need a random student quote from anybody who goes to school there, I can just walk on campus and get that face-to-face quote, which is always better," he said. "But if I need a specific type of student -- specific major, specific class, specific interest, specific age -- that's been an amazing resource for me. Unprecedented."

He said social networking allows him to write more authoritatively and get more students into the paper. He can get a lot more students into his stories now because it's much easier to find the students he needs, which he thinks is really important.

In his current newsroom, it's a bit unclear how editors feel about using social networks in the reporting process. At his old paper, a lot of his coworkers used social networks to help improve their reporting, but social networking is a new frontier for newspapers. Most papers are still forming policies about appropriate use of social networks for work proposes. 

"We still have this situation where all the top editors are the old people," he said. "And they just haven't fully embraced how online can help our jobs."

He tries to stress to his editors that he uses Facebook as a starting point. He uses it as a way to contact students via e-mail, the phone or in person. He does not quote people's profiles.

Brooks believes part of the problem is that many editors just haven't used Facebook or MySpace, and so they have misconceptions about what they are about. There is a large fear of the unknown. He thinks they just need to be exposed to social networks and use them.

"Everybody who has a Facebook profile are younger reporters," he said about his paper. "That just goes to show that [the people who are wary about social networks] don't know what this is about."

At Beat Blogging, we have found different social networks work better for different beats. Facebook was originally a college-only social network. It is well suited for education beats.

Twitter is a poor social network for local beats because it does not have a lot of users, but it can be very helpful for national beats. It has been very helpful in helping me report for Beat Blogging.

I have yet to find anyone who really finds MySpace helpful for beat reporting and beat blogging, but Brooks does occasionally use it. Others have found value in using Delicious to find and share content.

Interview with Zac Echola about comment moderation

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 reporters and bloggers who interact with users tend to keep things cleaner and more on topic.

Forum Communications allows it individual papers to decide how they want to handle comments. Some are very hands on with moderation, while others are more hands off. Echola believes you have to pick a method and stick with it. He has noticed some publishers and editors spend a lot of time nitpicking over which comments to approve.

"Comments are one of those things that if you want to, you can let them take up a lot of your time," he said. "Personally, while I think we should engage and should work in some sort of way, discussing things with people on comment boards, I don't necessarily think it has to be this thing that has to be constantly monitored and constantly watched."

That's an interesting take on comment moderation. A lot of newspapers choose to go the other route, spending a lot of time on moderation but very little time on reader interaction. While the latter method may keep comments PG, it won't help foment strong conversations.

Echola has some tips for spotting suspect comments quickly and easily. Comments that are in all caps or are all lowercase are often written by trolls or are probably a personal attack. Really long and really short posts also are a red flag for Echola.

Echola discusses these points and much more.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

What do you like/dislike about BeatBlogging.Org?

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 to you? How can we serve you better?

This site is tool to help journalists and journalism organizations learn about how to innovate on the Web with beat reporting. Help us make that tool better.

Beat blogging explained in a video by Jay Rosen

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 about making connections online to allow beat reporters to do their jobs better.

Watch the video; it's well worth your time.

Dispelling FUD on news Web sites and blogs

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 for or against something. For instance, Kent Fischer gets FUD on his blog from people who are against the Dallas Independent School District and vice versa.

FUD can be caused by passing along information that a person believes to be correct, but actually is false. Most often, however, FUD is a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation.

Virtually any Web site or blog that gets enough users will have at least some amount of FUD. The best beat bloggers, however, don't allow FUD to take hold on their blogs. Those beat bloggers take ownership over the comments and community that forms on their beat blogs.

If one person posts FUD, it's more than likely that others have the same beliefs. So rather than delete offending posts, many beat bloggers choose to directly respond to those posting FUD to correct them and sometimes admonish them. The SciGuy Eric Berger is very good at dispelling FUD.

Let's look at a benign example. Recently Berger made a post about how most foreign students who come to America for science and engineering PhDs stick around after they graduate. Here is an an exchange from his blog

One user wrote about why he believes some people being educated in the U.S. are looking to move to other countries:

The trend is reversing because this country is not funding enough research. Taiwan is. Korea is. China is. Canada is. I will have exceptional mobility once I have my PhD. I am going to go where the science is being done. Whether that is a city in the US or Seoul is largely irrelevant to me. Any modern country with reasonable freedoms will do. I you want me here, you'd better cough up the money.

Berger responded with:

While some of this might be true, the U.S. still funds about 40 percent of the world's science R&D.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/2008/RAND_RB9347.pdf

Has the country made some poor choices and has the budget tightening of the last several years hurt? Unquestionably. But in many (though not certainly all, such as superconductors) fields your best bet for cutting edge research is right here.

So, while it may be true that the U.S. has cut down on R&D spending recently, it still spends a lot on R&D compared to the rest of the world. In fact, Berger's post, Do most Chinese students come here to steal secrets? was an attempt to dispel FUD perpetrated by a U.S. Congressman.:

In any case, this fear was probably most bluntly articulated by U.S. Rep. John Culberson, whom I heard speak on this issue a few years ago at a science luncheon in Houston. Many professors from local universities were there. During a Q&A, the Congressman was asked about the problem with foreign-born students obtaining visas after 9/11. He responded:

"A concern that I continue to see is that a lot of those scientists from communist China, my impression is, and correct me if I am wrong, come here and learn as much as they can, and then leave. And I'm not really all that much into helping the communists figure out how to better target their intercontinental ballistic missles at the United States. They basically steal our technology for military applications. And they are red China, let's not forget."

The answer is a strong no. Berger points out that the five-year stay rate of students from China is 92 percent. That's higher than India, Taiwan and South Korea. The majority of foreign doctoral students in the sciences come from those four countries.

Berger does not allow disinformation to be spread from his blog. He actively engages his users and takes ownership over the conversation on his blog.

Is it irresponsible for news organizations to allow FUD to go unchallenged? Is this another reason why beat reporters and bloggers need to take responsibility for the comments on their own stories and posts?