Beginner’s guide to beatblogging

Patrick Thornton explains what beatblogging is, why journalists need to do it, who does it best, and offers examples of practices that lead to a successful beatblog.

Auman makes Beatblogging’s leaderboard

Greg Auman, sports writer for the St. Petersburg Times (my hometown paper) has been recognized for his outstanding contribution in the service of excellence to beatblogging. Or whatever they call that award.

Let’s look at two of the reasons he was elevated to Beatblogging’s leaderboard:

• Auman is the perfect combination of good sports reporting combined with more casual blog posts and a health dose of interaction.
• The level of interaction that Auman engages in — from the comments after his blog posts to Twitter to live chats — is a level that all sports reporters should strive to achieve.

Saved searches come to Twitter

Good news if you’ve discovered the power of using Twitter to work on stories.

Beatblogging reports that Twitter has now developed a Web interface allowing users to save their searches.

Tweet your classfieds with iList micro

Over at BeatBlogging, Patrick Thornton thinks iList micro may be the ticket to help newspapers reclaim revenue in classifieds:

iList, the classifieds site for instantly broadcasting your listing to your friends across your favorite social sites, has just made itself incredibly useful to Twitter users who hate to go anywhere else with iList Micro.

With iList Micro now all you have to do to create a classified listing is tweet what you are offering and use the hashtag #ihave in your tweet. Likewise, you can tweet that you’re interested in something by using the hashtag #iwant. Your #ihave and #iwant tweets will automatically get picked up by iList and added to their microlisting site, where anyone can search from the available assortment of twittered classified ads.

Blogging’s not enough

You also have to be a good marketer of yourself and your ideas, as Patrick Thornton points out in his latest post at Beatblogging.org, Blog your way into a job:

Blogging your way into a job — Yes, personal blogs make people money, and ads aren’t needed either. I wouldn’t have this job without my personal blog. I’m not the only one with this story either. Tony Pierce wouldn’t be heading up the LA Times’s blogging efforts if he didn’t blog on his own time.

Blogging may never get you a job. But with persistence, it can introduce you to some great minds, strengthen your writing, and enrich your life.

Beatblogging defined

Who better than Beatblogging.org to describe what beatblogging is and what it means for journalists:

A beatblogger, simply put, is a beat reporter who uses their blog as a tool to engage their readers, interact with them, use them as sources, crowdsource their ideas and invite them to contribute to the reporting process. When a beat reporter uses social networking with the community to create hyper-local and hyper-focused stories – that’s beatblogging.

Read the entire post, “What it takes to be a beat blogger.”

Twitter, TweetDeck and you

If you’re at all intimidated by Twitter, or haven’t been convinced of its usefulness as a reporting tool, you just might change your mind after visiting Beatblogging.org’s latest screencast.

Patrick Thornton goes over the importance of Twitter for him as a reporting tool, and offers advice to get others to follow you. He also introduces TweetDeck (which looks great) and describes why it has value (breaks down tweets into column view, ability to monitor Twitter for story ideas, a dedicated search column).

Oh, and when he gets to the TweetDeck presentation, keep an eye out for the handsome guy in the third column.

Journalism and hyperlinks

Beatblogging.org looks at three different bloggers (two of whom work for the Dallas Morning News) who are making smart use of hyperlinks in their blog posts to help readers navigate the information overload of the Web.

It’s called “good curation,” the process for which is described in lucid detail by University of Florida professor Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism.