Beating the drum for blogs as beat reporting tools

Reporters at 12 U.S. media outlets will use Web 2.0 tools to expand and better tap their source networks as part of an intriguing new initiative called Beatblogging.org.

It’s the latest online project from Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor I last interviewed in July when he was launching open-source political reporting site OffTheBus.net in conjunction with the Huffington Post.

The common thread: helping journalists super-charge their reporting by adapting emerging online tools and research methods. It might be sexier to chase the next big tech innovation, but Rosen understands the value in developing best practices for what already exists.

Here’s how he described the Beatblogging.org concept on his PressThink blog: “Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a ‘live’ social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.”

My initial reaction: Rosen was out to reinvent the wheel. After all, a growing number of beat reporters already use blogs to open up the sourcing conversation.

But those examples tend to be happy accidents as informed communities coalesce in the comment sections of subject-specific blogs. Maybe beat reporters with targeted editorial support and a site for working out problems and sharing successes can boost the practice to the next level.

“If you are asking, aren’t people doing things like this already, absolutely they are,” Rosen said via e-mail. “There’s a lot to build on. You could say that it’s just an intensification and maybe a formalization of an informal system that some bloggers have already.”

Participating news organizations include eight daily papers and two education journals, as well as Wired.com and ESPN.com. Beats range from local governments and schools to entire industries.

Seattle Times technology columnist and reporter Brier Dudley signed on with Beatblogging.org to explore new sourcing methods for covering Microsoft and other Pacific Northwest tech companies, for instance.

“Blogging’s past the hype phase,” Dudley said Wednesday. “We’re getting more realistic about what it is and more practical about using the tools.”

He’s working with the paper’s Web team to add social-networking bells and whistles to his existing blog — including a “wiki” tool sources can use to post announcements and story ideas. Dudley’s also thinking about creating an online advisory board.

“I want to set up a more regular way to interact with sources who I may not interact with as regularly as I like,” he said. Another goal: making the tools accessible and appealing to people who don’t live their lives online.

That could lead to a larger source base informing news reporting in a more open and transparent fashion. However, “I’m not going to give up the filtering job that I do,” Dudley said. A key question: “Will this give me more junk to filter, or will it help me do my job better?”

With a dozen organizations testing the possibilities, participants hope some promising models will emerge.

Dudley stressed the importance of media outlets customizing their own Web tools instead of working via YouTube and other sites with grabby user agreements. “I’m not really sure I want to be doing my work on a platform that says it owns everything I write,” he said.

Developing collaborative sourcing tools that all interested reporters can tap into “may very well be a part of the project,” Rosen said. However, he added, “Most of the really challenging problems are in organizing the people in the network and connecting them to editorial production. It’s in what you ask them to do and how you integrate them into the making of stories, features and informational services. Compared to that, the technology part is easy.”

So while the idea behind Beatblogging.org isn’t earth-shaking, the project might break some important ground for the news business.