A Blogging Beat at a Newspaper

I just got an email from a reporter for a Big Newspaper that's starting a blogging beat. Now that's a sea change...

Comments

[Tom Johnson]

But I wonder if the BIG NEWSPAPER will understand that the process of linkage and blog infrastructure will ultimately be more important than the content?

[Paul Jones]

Not to dispell the drama here, but I noticed that David Carr of the NYTimes will be covering blog in a little posting today. And that's not all. There are two reports from/about the Big Newspaper and Blogs out from the Big Newspaper itself. Here and Here (this from Editor and Publisher)
My own blog may be a little slow because of the intense Groklaw activity today.

[Alex Krupp]

So they are adding a weekly section talking about what bloggers are saying about them?

I have said this before on this site I think, but the reason why dinner and a movie are a traditional first date is so that you have something to talk about during dinner after the movie. Similarly, half the point of the paper is having something in common with other people to talk about, so in that sense it doesn't even matter if the news is true or made up. After all, most of the stuff talked about in news will never affect your life anyway; things that are newsworthy are things that are by definition very rare and almost never happen to people. Whether you can talk about something in the paper with someone else is what makes it 'real', for all intents and purposes, not whether it actually happened or not.

By not aggregating the conversation into a common place, they are missing out on half or more of their revenue potential.

/armchair CEO of the Times

[Jon Garfunkel]

"the process of linkage and blog infrastructure will ultimately be more important than the content" says who? This is one of the great myths. What's valued by media geeks is not necessarily valued by the reading public.

Sea change? it's a fad, they respond to it. It actually helps build the myth that bloggers are special creatures, just leave them in the blog corner. The Boston Globe has tapped Adam Gaffin to skim off the best of the UniversalHub blog/RSS aggregation site he runs (a story of mine got blurbed the first week), but it's in a tiny little corner of the Sunday Local section, and it occasionally gets kicked off if they need to squeeze in other content.

[adamg]

But the local section's actually a good place for what I'm doing - because I focus on what local bloggers are saying about local stuff, rather than, say, repeating A-List blather.

[Jon Garfunkel]

You are sharp, Adam. When I said "occasionally" I only know of one occasion-- was I reaching here? I get the feeling that UH is put in the corner (Boston.com does have the Job Blog, the Sox Blog). But readers of my Civilities know that I've been long contested the meme of blogging as an end to itself. There are interactive features that ought to be injected across the board (and Boston.com much more community-friendly than its corporate parent, NYTimes.com; then again, it's not a paper of the world. :-) I think that the focus on blogs misses the larger points of community interactivity, and this mostly serves the blogging elite. And I'll say the same thing at PDF next Monday.

[Frank Jordans]

"But I wonder if the BIG NEWSPAPER will understand that the process of linkage and blog infrastructure will ultimately be more important than the content?"

One BIG NEWSPAPER (in relative terms) has already understood this: the Observer blog

[Seth Finkelstein]

Umm, before going further, would it be possible to clarify "blogging beat"?

That is, of the three or four items that might be included, what is the selection algorithm? Is it "What other big-audience pundits who syndicate their columns via Internet distribution - which makes them revolutionary to *us* - happen to be saying about the same things we are covering elsewhere?" Or "Send us tips, we'll go through the slush-pile, consider it Op-Ed Jr."?

As I keep saying, non-media people have very little stake in the game of "musical pundits".

[cresmer]

I have a blogging beat--I write for Seven Days newspaper, in Burlington, Vermont. My blog, 802 Online, includes a Vermont blogroll, which attempts to provide a link to all of the state's bloggers. I launched it independently last August, but it went live as a Seven Days feature last week.

My beat is basically the Vermont blogosphere. I'm attempting to map it, and to report on it as it expands. I'm also keeping track of the decisions affecting Vermont's expanding technological infrastructure. And in a feature called "Weekend Wi-fi," I'll be visiting places in Vermont that provide wi-fi, and reporting on how and why they do, and who's using their connection.

[Bill Hobbs]

Michael Silence is a reporter and blogger for the Knoxville News Sentinel whose job is to report on the blogosphere and include Tennessee bloggers in his stories. You can find his blog at http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/silence/

He also came to the BlogNashville conference. His story last fall on the launch of a new blog, "Lance In Iraq," (http://iraq.billhobbs.com) - a new blog by a member of the 278th Tennessee National Guard deployed to Iraq - helped drive huge traffic. (An Instapundit link also helped). The site got 17,500 unique visitors in its first 14 days. The Instalanche drove the hits, but the Knoxville story, which got picked up by the AP, drove massive traffic to the comments section.

[David Feld]

FYI, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., has begun Tar Heel Blogwatch to spotlight bloggers in our area. It's one of a half dozen blogs we've launched in the last two weeks. More to come.

You can find this blog at:
http://blogs.newsobserver.com/index.php?blog=8

The N&O blogs home page is here:
http://blogs.newsobserver.com