Blogging allows for reporters to report more, troll for comments less
Over at BeatBlogging.org, I have a post about how “Beat Blogging allows reporters to concentrate on core reporting”:
When writing for the print edition, reporters often have to spend large amounts of time getting “man on the street” quotes from random people to flush out stories.
Not with blogging. That’s what the comment section of each blog post is for. That frees up a reporter to focus on his or her core job — reporting.
Example: Let’s say I’m an education reporter and the latest budget for a school district I am covering is announced. The story would detail the new budget with regards to the previous one, any cuts or additions, what the super superintendent thinks, perhaps a school board contact and maybe a few comments from teachers. It all really depends on how much the budget has changed.
But most editors would say that’s not the full story. They would want to know what “real people” think about the new budget. An editor would tell that reporter to call up random parents, until he or she has some quality quotes. The problem is those comments often take a long time to obtain:
Kent Fischer of the Dallas Morning News estimates that he used to spend upwards of 80% of his time getting those quotes to appease his editors for the print edition. His blog and beat are on the Dallas Independent School District, and his editors always wanted a parent’s voice or some other readers thoughts in his stories.
Fischer called that kind of reporting “contrived.” He had to fish around for quotes from random people, which would often eat up precious hours of his day that he could have used to report on more topics.
Often times those comments really are contrived. I know it, you know it — heck any reporter knows it. How many of those parents that would be contacted would have really looked over the full budget or had time to digest what had just been announced? Not many.
But that’s the beauty of using a blog to beat report. Anyone can leave a comment on a blog voicing his or her concerns or approval of the latest budget. This means a lot more than the few parents normally quoted in a print story can have a voice. Anyone can have a voice now — parents, students, teachers, etc.
It gets better. People can respond to each other, have a dialogue and form a community in the comment section of a blog. Often a story can come alive in the comments section where people begin to really digest and discuss what has happened.
And blogging also allows reporters to link to relevant content — like say the budget and other documents about school spending. Print could never do that.
Beat Blogging is about making reporting better and more modern. And wouldn’t being able to spend more time reporting and less time trolling for random comments make your reporting better?
You can read my full post on this subject here.
June 24th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Pat,
Interesting post. I too use my blog and Twitter to find sources for stories.
But I have a question. How often do the quotes on Fischer’s blog make it into his stories? I see from the beatblogging post that since he doesn’t use anonymous sources in the paper, that disqualifies many of the comments.
But do any of the comments make it into the paper? I imagine his editors still want real people quotes for the print edition, regardless if they come from blog comments or man on the street interviews.
I’ve often had trouble convincing people to allow me to quote them in the print edition even when they are all over the Web (blog comments, Facebook, Yelp etc) posting things under their real names. People still seem to to think of “being in the paper” as much scarier than being active online. Perhaps it’s because they realize their parents or bosses would be more likely to see their quote in the print edition than online?
Etan
June 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Etan, you bring up a good point. However, papers seem to vary quite a bit in their approaches to repackaging online content for the print edition. The paper I worked for had no problem printing a conglomeration of comments from its most controversial stories in the Sunday edition each week. Whether it’s sound journalism or not, we used screennames as attribution.
I understand the concern that using screennames may not make comments seem as reputable as using a person’s “real name,” but at most of today’s papers, no one would know if sources gave names other than their own…how much fact checking is really done? I could easily give my neighbor’s name and address and no one would know the difference … is a screenname less legitimate than a birth name?
June 24th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
To see three recent real-life examples of what Pat is talking about go here:
http://dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/06/the-200809-budget-all-the-docu.html
http://dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/06/the-200809-budget-who-wins-who.html
http://dallasisdblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/06/the-200809-budget-does-money-m.html
You can see how, by the third post, a reader had taken my work and added to it. I believe we’d have had more comments/input on the budget but the district is currently on summer break.
And to answer Etan’s question: Very few of those blog comments make it into the paper. In that respect, blogging doesn’t save me time and/or effort for the print edition. Pat and I talked about how blogging only adds to my workload; it hasn’t yet proven to have made my for-print job easier.
June 24th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
First, I’m strongly prefer is this discussion occurred over at BeatBlogging.org.
I believe Kent’s exact words were, “I’m working two jobs now.” Kent is, however, angling to be an online-only reporter. He has some big plans for the future to take his blog to a whole new level.
It sounds like the problem is that there isn’t a lot of synergy between print and online at many papers. Kent is often asked to duplicate his work for print or try to repurpose his blog for print. That makes no sense.
What works online often doesn’t work in print and vice versa. They are different formats with different strengths.
It makes more sense to write pieces for print that are more big picture, analysis types. Maybe once a week. Something like that.
June 24th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Bored - Yes, we often don’t know if someone is giving us a real name, but because I’m aware of that, whenever I have time, or I have a suspicion someone is giving me a fake name, I run the name through Nexis to see if what the person told me matches up with the public records.
My paper (the Orlando Sentinel) also prints reader comments from the Web, some of which have full names, some have first names, some have handles.
Kent - Thanks for the examples and the clarification. Not to slam Pat, but perhaps the headline of the post is misleading? I think the beat blogging is great, but as Kent points out, since editors still want the man on the street quotes for the print edition, he’s not “trolling for comments” any less than he used to.
So while blog comments may not yet translate into “average joe” quotes for the paper, I think that what beat blogging and Twitter do is give us another method to “troll for comments,” one that’s often more efficient and quicker than older methods.
I elaborated on this in a post I wrote on my tech blog about why journalists should use Twitter.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/etan_on_tech/2008/04/why-journalists.html
June 24th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
@Etan,
First, I agree with you that Twitter, blogging and other online forms can be a much more efficient way to troll for comments. I agree with the post you write, but I really think we have to begin thinking of print and Web as vastly different mediums. And if we do, we won’t be duplicating content.
If you check out the original Beat Blogging post you’ll see the graphic Kent created explaining what he means. I don’t think my headline is inaccurate, because Kent simply writes less print stories today, and I don’t think “man on the street” stories/comments have a place in print.
Yes, it’s true that in theory this wouldn’t save Kent time if he still had to write for the print edition in the same, old fashion that he always has, but Kent does spend more of his time on his blog than the print edition (and sometimes goes a bit of time without writing a print story).
As, I said in my previous comment, this wouldn’t be much of an issue if there was greater synergy between the two formats. Why duplicate work? Why would you ever do a “man on the street” story for print? That only allows a few men or women on the street to comment, and it completely ignores the power of two-way communication that the Web excels at. With the Web, everything can become a conversation.
I wouldn’t recommend writing long, in-depth analysis pieces for the Web. Those are strongly the domain of the print edition. It’s all about rethinking what we do for both online and in print. Kent has only been doing his blog for about 6 months, and it stands to reason both his work on his blog and off of it will be changing over time.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I realize you think anyone who doesn’t agree with you “just doesn’t get it,” but this is yet another terrible idea.
There are better ways to get comments than “just calling up random people.” If you can’t figure that out, then it’s time to leave the newsroom.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Pat,
Sorry for starting the discussion here instead of beat blogging.
I didn’t realize Kent is spending less time writing for the print edition, so this makes more sense now.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
No problem Etan. I’m just trying to get people to head on over to BeatBlogging.org.
I’ll be keeping on eye on Kent over these next few months to see how his beat changes. He has some pretty cool ideas.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I’ve contacted Twitter followers because I knew they already had something interesting to say about an event. A local woman posted photos of storm damage via TwitPic, which allowed me to contact her and make arrangements to use the photos online and in the paper.
Commenters in blogs often provide what I think of as the second of three narratives to a story.
First is the story the reporter writes, based mostly on authorities and some eyewitnesses or family members, but incomplete because no one knows the whole story.
Second is the story the commenters tell, from exes, old high school classmates, feuding neighbors, etc., like a docu-drama where parts are true and parts aren’t, but you’re not sure which.
Third is the much better story a reporter can tell after following all those leads.
When a soldier from the area died in Iraq, one of the comments on the story was from his best friend in the unit, which led to a fuller, richer story on the follow-up.