MySanAntonio.com has a blog dedicated to helping staff bloggers blog better.

What a novel idea! Instead of just telling staff members to blog blindly, they are providing staffers with a resource on what this new medium is and how to utilize it well (and I’m sure blogging is a very new concept to many of their staffers). The blog tackles big and small issues ranging from how to post or edit an entry to discussing ideas about how to improve blogging and integrate better with the newsroom.

A resource like this seems like common sense. Hell, it is common sense, but how many other papers have a public blog where they help their staff bloggers get better? Some news organizations, like mine, give bloggers a Word file with some rules and guidelines.

Blogging is an interactive medium. It’s a two-way conversation. Blogging is ever evolving.

A Word document is none of those. A blog is a fantastic staff resource because it is interactive, it allows for (public) feedback and it is ever evolving. Just as news organizations need to evolve, so do staff resources.

Every news organization that has bloggers should have a resource like this.

MultimediaShooter.com was hacked over the weekend and appears down for the count.

What a senseless act that has hurt many people, and is a big loss to the online journalism community. For the life of me, I’ll never figure out the motivations of hackers who attack random, innocent people just to see them suffer.

Here is the message that was posted at MultimediaShooter:

RIP

I write this with a very heavy heart:

I am sorry to report that this website is down for the count. The site was recently hacked several

times this weekend and severe damage was done. I do not have the time or resources at this time to

continue. I wish you all the best. I only wish this hadn’t happened.

[To the ‘hacker’ I hope it makes you happy to destroy something that people put their

heart and soul into for years, for the sole purpose of learning and creating a small community

on the web. Just to have you destroy it for no reason. You win. There is a special place in hell for you.]

To those of you who supported the site over the years, THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

I don’t know what more to say, except, remember, it’s all about the STORY, not the TOOLS.

The first thing I did after reading this was back up my site. My server does back up my blog for me, but it’s good to have a copy stored locally. This incident is yet another reminder that we have to more careful with backing up, because it’s a messed up world out there. Not only do we have to deal with issues with upgrades going wrong and servers going down, but we also have to deal with idiots who derive joy out of seeing others suffer.

I know I don’t back up nearly enough. I need to find a good way to automate the process. I hope MultimediaShooter.com rises from the ashes.

For all our sakes.

Why not blog your beat and then reverse publish the content to print?

People want continuous updates throughout the day. That’s why sites like TechCrunch are so wildly popular. People want experts on niches and they want to get news in real time.

Most good beat writers at newspapers are experts in a niche. Take a local court reporter for example. A newspaper’s local court reporter might be the only media person in the world with intimate knowledge of how that court system works and of the legal issues surrounding the community.

That’s a niche to exploit. The same goes for just about any other beat at a local newspaper.

If you’re a local sports writer and you’re not blogging, you’re an idiot. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. You’re sitting on a gold mine.

Good Beat Blogging is more than just having a blog at your news organization’s Web site. It also means harnessing social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Utterz and others. It means getting your niche content out to your niche in as many ways as possible.

It also means not thinking of your blog as a complement to your print stories. Oh, no no no. Your print stories are a complement to your Beat Blog. Get it straight.

Now don’t think of this as more work. It’s smarter work. Blog content, tweets on Twitter and other postings can be used to make print stories. Twitter can be a great place for electronic and public notes.

Beat Blogging allows reporters to fill in readers as news is happening, not just after news has marinated for a day. But good Beat Blogging requires more than just a savvy reporter. It requires editors and a newsroom culture that allows it. No reporter will ever seriously be good at any kind of new media if he has to write three stories a day.

Until editors and publishers get away from thinking that having reporters write copious amounts of print copy is a good idea, innovative solutions like Beat Blogging will never take hold. And until that day happens, more and more newsroom jobs will have to be cut because of falling revenue.

Let’s get back to the local courtroom reporter example. She can write several blog posts a day, post on Twitter whenever new tidbits come in, send updates to Utterz via her mobile phone and manage a group on Facebook. Then once she has gathered all the information for the day and sorted through it all she can begin to write a good, in-depth analysis piece for the print addition.

Each segment of the content needs to be unique. A blog shouldn’t just be a rehash of tweets on Twitter. Print stories shouldn’t be the same as blog postings.  Multimedia content needs to add to the equation, not just be there for the sake of being there.

Niches are how the Web is won. Beat Blogging is the key for newsrooms to showcase their many niches.

Ultimately, it’s about informing your users at the speed they want to be informed at, which is right now.