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.