At BeatBlogging.Org I have noticed that many of our most successful beat bloggers have strong communities around their beats.

Community can trump content, but the best sites combine great content with a great community. Community is what makes people want to come back to a Web site over and over again. Ask an active Twitter user how often they are on Twitter each day. They might be embarrassed to tell you.

But it’s all about the community. A strong community, however, takes cultivation. It takes a moderator who is willing to mix it up with the people formally known as the audience.

That can be a scary suggestion for many journalists, but one-way communication will not build a community. And the Web is all about communities.

The SciGuy Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle sometimes has posts garner more than 100,000 page views. Not bad for a blog dedicated to a less-than-controversial topic like science (unlike political blogs, which are easy to generate traffic to). From the start, Berger has striven to build a community that people wanted to come back to everyday.

I strongly recommend you listen to my audio interview with Berger about building a community and forward it around your newsroom. There is no shame in stealing someone’s successful ideas, and you’ll find many successful ideas over at BeatBlogging.Org on how to innovate on the Web.

Some tips for building community:

1. Read and respond to comments on blog posts — At first, Berger tried to respond to every one he could. The more he responded, the more other people responded. He was the catalyst for two-way communication taking off on his blog. A nice side effect is that his presence in the comments section helps keep the comments more on topic and civil. People are less willing to say outrageous things if they know the author is reading — and judging — their posts.
2. Think outside of the box — When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out, Berger took six readers to go see it. He took three skeptics and three people who believed in global warming or who were neutral. After they all viewed the film, they had a discussion about what they saw and if the film had changed their views. Berger then transcribed the interview and put it on his blog, and some of it ended up in the print edition. It was a smashing success.
3. Ask for user input — If you’re serious about two-way communication, you should actively court user opinion. This can be as simple as ending blog posts with questions. Or it can be more in-depth like making online surveys for your users to take on big topics.
4. Some of your users know more than you — This is one reason why some beat blogs allow guest bloggers. Kent Fischer covers the Dallas Independent School District, and many of his readers work for the district. Some of those people probably more about the ins and outs of the district than he does. So during the slow summer months, he is asking some of them to guest blog. Allowing users to hold the conch every now and then can be very empowering for them. It’s a great way to let them know that you value their opinions.

I am strongly disappointed by the out-right negativity permeating through journalism right now.

The anger, the negativity, the we-can’t attitude hit a flash point on an intern’s post about job cuts and a newsroom reorganization. Yes, grown-up journalists were using an intern as a punching bag.

If you don’t believe journalism can be turned around, leave now. Find a new career. A prerequisite for success is believing in yourself.

Enthusiastic, bright-eyed, thoughtful and energetic interns and journalism students — the kinds of people we’ll need to turn this industry around — are being told to find a new career by angry journalists. Jessica DaSilva has encountered this in several internships:

Another problem I (and my peers) have encountered in internships is an eagerness to turn us away from journalism or jade us in some way. We all wonder why. I mean, if we all followed the popular mantra of “go to law school and make your mother proud,” then what would be the future of journalism?

Discouraging people who want to save journalism is not going to help us save journalism. And trust me, journalism needs to be saved. But it can only be saved by people who believe that journalism can and will thrive.

Do you believe?

I believe in journalism. In fact, I think the Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism. Now people can interact with news.

People can have a voice. And reporters can embrace interacting with the community. That’s a powerful thing.

The Internet and the Web are fundamentally better at disseminating news and information than either print or broadcast. People have been voting with their eyeballs and dollars. As journalists, we need to be where people are.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say every newsroom reorganization is going to be successful. Many — perhaps most — will not be. But I would rather try something new and risk the potential for failure — or success — than continue doing something that I know will fail.

And if most news organizations continue down the path they are on right now, they will fail. Change isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to turn things around. It’s important for news organizations to realize that innovation often requires a reallocation of resources.

It’s easier to believe that there is no solution, rather than come up with one. That’s an idea that is killing journalism. It’s an idea that sustains the curmudgeon tribe of journalists.

There are solutions and there have been Web success stories. CNET has become a powerful and successful force in tech news on the Web. CBS recently bought CNET for $1.8 billion.

Blog network and advocacy journalism innovator The Huffington Post is worth upwards of $100 million. TechCrunch has 3.2 million unique visitors and is ranked in the top 1,000 most visited sites in the world by Alexa. Not bad for tech blog staffed by a handful of employees.

All of these examples have one thing in common: They don’t look and operate like legacy media companies. They exploit the strengths of the medium they are working on. How many newspapers and legacy news organizations can say they have really exploited the Web as a medium?

Companies make money off the Web all the time. If journalism companies want to succeed on the Web they can. But that means making tough decisions.

It means cutting some legacy staff. It means reallocating resources. It means taking risks — sometimes huge risks.

All this talk about how journalism is a public service and how it protects democracy will mean nothing if we don’t believe in ourselves and take risks. The future of journalism depends on it.

I believe. Do you?

Asking if blogging is journalism is like asking if desktop publishing is journalism.

The answer is sometimes. Both are just publishing platforms.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

At BeatBlogging.Org you’ll find many examples of journalists using blogging and other online tools to take their beat reporting to the next level. But most blogs are much truer to the original “Web log” concept than actual platforms for journalism.

Most bloggers just want to share their thoughts, feelings and lives with the world. Some, however, use blogging to take their beat reporting to the next level.

Are institutional memory and inertia killing the newspaper industry?

After reading the comments on a myriad of posts from journalists stuck in the past, I can’t help but think that there is no future for newspapers as long as the majority of their staffs (editorial and business) — and their collective institutional memories — are still around. Every change that is proposed, every new idea that is thought of, every staff cut that is made, is always compared to the old way of doing things.

The problem is that the old way of doing things for newspapers shares nothing in common with what 21st-century journalism is shaping up to be. What we are seeing is not a major change for the newspaper industry. It is a monumental rethinking of everything that newspapers have ever done.

This isn’t going from gas-powered cars to fuel cells. This is more akin to colonizing space.

And if you’re not prepared to colonize space, get the hell out of the way.

Can you imagine tailoring your reporting to fit a space dictated by a medium and not by the actual story?

Unreal. Imagine a world in which you write as much or as little as needed. Have one photo to go with a story? Have 500? Want to link to other sites, documents, databases and content?

That’s the power of the Web. That’s the power of blogging your beat.

The beat blog killed the news hole.

But I’m saving more links to my delicious feed in the right column, and I’m conversing more than ever on Twitter.

And, of course, I’m blogging at BeatBlogging.Org. If you’re looking for beat reporters pushing the practice using online tools and social networking, that’s the place to be. Want to modernize your beat reporting? Go to BeatBlogging.Org immediately.

I encourage you to check out my delicious links. They are almost entirely journalism focused (often online journalism related), and I always save a blurb (either a quote or my thoughts) about each link. They are updating constantly throughout the day, and now that I looking into the journalism industry as my full-time job, I have a lot more links to share.

If there is sufficient demand, I would consider doing a daily link post like many blogs do. I put the the delicious feed in the right column so that you could get new links all day long, instead of once a day.

Time to go write a real post.