Electric Fishwrap has moved

What happens when 13 news reporters try to build social networks into their beats?

I’m not sure, but you can follow it here, at Beatblogging.org.

Beats of every stripe and color, from the pharmaceutical industry to sports to education, are represented in the list.

For instance, Education Week started a Ning network of experts to help gather news:

We like the idea of using a “network” of well-connected experts, tech savvy administrators and principals, innovative teachers, ed. tech. industry players, and others, initially, to identify the top 10 ed. tech. problems schools are facing and how they should go about tackling those problems.

Look along the side of the Beatblogging page and you’ll find links to the news organizations and any Ning networks they have.

I am really happy to see news organizations taking the plunge with this idea. But I know a lot of newspapers, mine included, would balk because of legal ramifications. Nothing wrong with being careful, but if I recall correctly much of the paranoia about legal issues is widely untested.

But it seems reporters could build a closed social network to ask questions of sources who could answer at their leisure. That would be way better than calling each one on the phone or sending a blast email, in my opinion. But of course you would have to have sources who actually check Ning once in a while, too.

I know I’m late to the party on this (see post here from Ryan Sholin) . I have a valid excuse (selling my World of Warcraft accounts takes more time than I thought, yes I’m a video game dork).

Last year Ron Sylvester blogged for his newspaper’s Web site for the murder of a small-town sheriff (EDIT: Added link). I read along as the trial unfolded, and it was incredibly riveting. But sometimes it took a while for blog posts to appear on the Web site due to editing resources.

This time, Sylvester is covering another murder trial. The copy desk said “no more.”

People are going on vacation. We’re short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

Like any journalist with a passion, he thought around the problem. He started posting updates on Twitter. Usually his paper doesn’t cover jury selection, but this time they did. It was a capital murder trial. He wanted to know who was going to be on the jury.

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I just saw a link to this from Slashdot. Apparently a CNN producer, Chez Paziena, got fired from his job for having a blog. More specifically the opinions he expressed on his blog, even though he never wrote about his job.

He started a blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, to keep himself busy after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Chez had not seen an HR book until a month before he was approached to be fired:

I said that they can’t possibly expect CNN employees, en masse, to not engage in something as popular and timely as blogging if they don’t make themselves perfectly clear.

My HR rep’s response: “Well, as far as we know, you’re the only CNN employee who’s blogging under his own name.”

It took self-control I didn’t know I had to keep from laughing, considering that I could’ve named five people off the top of my head who blog without hiding their identities.

I really wonder how many smaller news orgs actually have rules on outside blogging. I’m pretty sure my bosses know I blog but they haven’t said anything. It’s not like I hide it. Other than that, I blog almost daily for a World of Warcraft guild site that I run. (but that’s not connected to my real name and if anything people would think know I’m weird instead of dangerous if they saw it).

I want to have a regular blog at my paper on my beat within a year. So when the Western Washington SPJ chapter had a training on how to blog, I jumped at the chance.

Sounds silly right? You just write stuff down, tell everyone what you think and post something insubstantial every day right?

No, not at all. Geoff Baker, who writes the Mariners Blog for the Seattle Times, and David Postman, who writes Postman on Politics for the Times, said blogging actually takes up a large part of their day.

Postman, the paper’s chief political reporter, said he almost exclusively writes for the blog and occasionally editors will pull something from the blog and put it in the paper with a header of “Exerpts from the blog.” Blogs are not opinion, at least blogs from newspapers should not be, he said.

“I bring the standards of the paper to the blog, not lower my standard to what is out there,” (I cannot remember which one of them said this, my notes are unclear, but I think either one of them could have said it because they had the same message).

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