Beat Blogging

Review: Chris Anderson of Wired on how to create a social network

Patrick Thornton — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:14:15 -0700

I watched this 55-minute talk with Chris Anderson over at Media Bistro in hopes of figuring out if the video was worth your time and money.

Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and the author of The Long Tail. It's certainly worth your time to watch this video, but at $15 for 55 minutes (some of which is a Q&A), is it worth your money?

Anderson is a very good speaker who has thoughtful and provocative things to say. If your a media executive or editor and you need all the help you can get trying to figure out how to build an online community, it's probably worth your money, especially if this video is for work. The content is there, and this $15 could help make your online projects a lot more successful.

An individual blogger would probably benefit from this video too, especially if that person is trying to build a strong community. If you're a journalist or media employee who wants to learn more about using social networking for business purposes, this is probably a bit expensive for your needs. And if you're a journalism student, it's probably way out of your budget.

But you can read my full review below and decide for yourself if Anderson's talk is worth the money. It's certainly a very good talk. Anderson lays out a blueprint for what media companies can do to roll out successful social networks. The key for Anderson is to first have compelling, niche content.

"Social networking is a feature, not a destination," he said. "It's something every good site should have. It's not something you go to."

Without that compelling content people won't come to your site. Social networking should be about building community, Anderson said. It doesn't have to be about friending people, according to Anderson, but rather it can be as simple as tracking the comments and posts made by users of a community and allowing others to see their history -- like Slashdot.

Blogs can be a simple way of forming a community. We have seen that at Beat Blogging with many of our beat bloggers, and Anderson has noticed the same trend to. With a few added features beyond a basic blog, a blog can become a social network.

Even with the right tools, however, it's still about specialization. Anderson recommends figuring out a specificity for your site and then making it more specific. Maybe you want to make a blog about digital photography. Anderson suggests narrowing that down a bit.

"The world does not need another generic social network," Anderson said. "The world needs an infinite number of hyper focused social networks that are about individual subjects."

Anderson is not a fan of Facebook or MySpace, but he is a big fan of Ning, because it's a social networking service that caters to the niche.

"It's not about Ning, it's about individual topics, whereas going to Facebook is always about Facebook," he said.

Ning has hundreds of thousands of networks ranging from the very small to large, but all are focused around a niche. Wired Journalists is an example of a medium-sized Ning network (one that all of you should be members of). I should caution, however, that most of our beat bloggers who have tried using Ning have not found success.

Part of the problem is that Ning requires people to go to yet another site. If you run a Ning site like Wired Journalists that's fine, but if you want to add a Ning site for your beat, it can be asking a lot of users to have to go to multiple sites. As a news organization, you could have your content and community in one place on a blog. Ning isn't the best place for that concept.

But the biggest problem we have seen with Ning may have been a lack of desire from users, and not Ning itself. Some niches were too vague (geographically focused, instead of subject-matter focused) and others weren't organic. People weren't interested in the ways the niches were broken down.

Anderson has found niche success with Ning, and his site is probably a good blueprint for how to form a compelling Ning site. He runs a network for amateur unmanned aerial vehicles. Very niche. Yet, it generates about 5,000 page views a day and makes about $400 a month from Google Adsense.

That's not bad at all for a side hobby. That's not bad at all for placing only one ad per page.

The last major point I want to stress about Anderson talk is how he considers engaging the community to be important. We have noticed this as well over at Beat Blogging. Anderson is not afraid to admonish users for poor behavior or outright ban them. But he also interacts with users and actively engages the community.

The comments section of any site will be cleaner if the owner (or blogger or writer) takes responsibility for what happens there. Eric Berger says people are less willing to post acidic comments if they know original writer is there reading their comments and judging them.

Anderson goes over more topics then this, but these are the key ones I highlighted from his talk, especially for journalists. The best use of this video might be to get a bunch of people together to watch it and then discuss it once it is over. It's certainly a conversation starter.

You can watch a preview of the video here.

Week 1 of a guest blogging experiment

Patrick Thornton — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:15:12 -0700

Kent Fischer has begun allowing guest bloggers on his beat blog for the Dallas Independent School District.

Fischer is hoping that these guest bloggers can help keep the conversation going during the slow summer months on his blog. The guest bloggers have gotten off to a strong start so far with some provocative posts.

Can they keep the momentum going? Will readers respond to guest bloggers? Will these guest posts help Fischer's blog connect more with the community?

Those are the questions I'll be answering in the coming weeks and months as I monitor this experiment. For now, here are a few observations:

The guest posts are written from a much more personal perspective. Fischer is an outsider reporting on the district, but his guest bloggers are insiders sharing their personal stories. His inaugural guest bloggers are two long-time veteran teachers of the school district. They should help liven up the blog.
Some of the topics discussed might not have come up otherwise in Fischer's reporting. One blog post is from a former DISD employee about how his insurance premiums have gone way down since he got a job in the private sector. This might be a catalyst for an in-depth reporting piece from Fischer. Another post was from a teacher about inadequate technology in classrooms and questionable district recycling practices.
The guest bloggers are getting comments from people on their blogs. Almost all the comments appear to be from district employees. This probably a reflection of the content. No one has really blogged from a parent perspective yet.

Kent Fischer debuts new feature to hoist user comments

Patrick Thornton — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:38:02 -0700

Last week, I wrote about hoisting comments, and how it can be a community building tool.

Kent Fischer, one of the beat bloggers who had already hoisted comments, has launched a new weekly feature, "Comment of the Week," dedicated to the best comment of the previous week:

We're starting a new Monday feature today where we'll honor, with extra special attention, the *best* reader-written comment we received from the previous week. Call it the Golden COW Award, short for the Comment of the Week.

This is a great, little, easy weekly feature that can help make users feel more connected to a blog (or a news site). Users often leave insightful comments. When hoisted, they can be another conversation starter.

Audio interview with Kent Fischer about building a blog on steroids

Patrick Thornton — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:54:16 -0700

Kent Fischer, and education blogger for The Dallas Morning News, wants to build a "blog on steroids."

In just six months, he has become a successful beat blogger with thousands of page views each day and plenty of comments from dedicated users. Now he realizes that he must take his work to the next level to keep growing and innovating on the Web.

Fischer's idea for combing beat blogging with database reporting might be the future of beat reporting on the Web. Essentially it's a micro-site, niche publication that will be the premier source of information related to his beat on the Dallas Independent School District.

Fischer says his biggest triumph with beat blogging was getting himself blogging. He went from "blog ignorance" to wanting to develop a blog on steroids in six months.

What has been the return on investment for his blog? Could his editors justify making him a full-time blogger? Fischer thinks the key is selling his blog to specific advertisers. He runs a niche blog, and he thinks they need to target niche advertisers.

Listen to the interview for details.

Click here to stream the interview. Or click here to download the MP3.

The art of hoisting comments

Patrick Thornton — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:37:42 -0700

Hoisting comments is a basic technique of beat blogging that involves highlighting the best user comments and bringing them above the fray.

Berkeley Economist Brad DeLong was one of the first to use the term to describe highlighting user comments. His hoisted comments often inspire users to comment even more, and hoisting comments is another strong community building technique.

There are several levels of hoisting comments. Kent Fischer, education blogger for The Dallas Morning news, hoists comments to the level of their own posts. He reads through the comments section on his posts, looking for comments that deserve more attention, especially ones that might be buried among many other comments. He then makes a separate post for those strong comments that users can comment on, furthering the discussion.

Fischer writes this about a recent comment that he hoisted to its own post:

Up from the depths of the Spruce High reorg discussion comes former Spruce teacher Sondra Tyler. The current college prof writes eloquently -- and piercingly -- about the reorganization of her former school.

Her words were too good to be left buried in the comments ... so I'm elevating them here to their own post, so more people will see them.

She writes, "I believe in the power of one, and there are survivors, so there is hope..."

Fischer has only hoisted a few comments so far, but he has found enough success that he is contemplating making it a weekly feature on Monday called, "Comment of the Week."

"I’d elevate the best reader comment from the previous week to a post of its own," Fischer said. "Just something fun to start the week. Monday mornings are usually slow on the blog anyway. I’ve also given some thought to picking, say, five posts from the previous week and creating an on-line Monday poll so that readers can select the “Comment of the Week” by voting for the one they liked best."

NYU's Press Thinker, and Beat Blogging collaborator, Jay Rosen hoists comments and other notes and reactions from the blogosphere about his post in a section he calls "After Matter" that is directly after each post. This gives his posts more life as they are updated with additional thoughts and reactions. It is also a place to highlight the best reactions to his material.

ESPN.com has a special section for select user comments in the lower, right side of its homepage called, "Featured Comment." It is updated several times a day. What ESPN does, however, is more of highlighting comments than hoisting them. ESPN does not create a separate page for the comment, but rather uses the comment it highlights to draw traffic back to the original story that was commented on.

And then there is a taking strong online comments and posting them in print. The San Francisco Chronicle, Charlotte Observer, Orlando Sentinel and many others do this. This strategy is aimed at building synergy between the Web and print.

One thing is clear about hoisting comments, it does require time and effort. Someone has to read through user comments and select which ones deserve special attention. A good beat blogger like Fischer, however, is very active in the comments section on his posts already, and so hoisting comments isn't a lot of extra work on his part. He interacts with users, reads what they have to say and knows what is going on in the comments section of his blog.

ESPN, on the other hand, has people whose job is to read and moderate comments. Those people also select comments to be highlighted. For beat reporters looking to hoist comments, it makes much more sense to personally hoist comments than to rely on someone else to do it. Good beat bloggers are already active in the comments sections of their blogs anyway.

Of course, hoisting comments requires a news organization to allow users to comment on stories, posts, photos and others content. A news organization would be foolish to not allow these forms of two-way communicatio and user interaction.

Berger back at his conversation starting ways

Patrick Thornton — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:17:05 -0700

Hot off the heels of his last popular online-survey efforts, the SciGuy Eric Berger has come up with another online survey that will probably be wildly popular -- and cause quite a stir.

Last time Berger asked his readers for their thoughts on science and religion. Now he wants their opinions on global warming:

Here's your chance to sound off on global warming, be you a believer, skeptic or undecided on the whole issue. The survey will cost you nothing, is ad-free and will help me better understand my readers. You can also tell me if you're sick of global warming coverage.

One reason Berger does these online survey is because he wants to understand his audience better, which he hopes will allow him to serve them better in the future. With his science and religion survey, Berger learned that, despite being a science blog, many of his readers were religious. Berger is very careful not to offend religious readers, while many national science blogs are outwardly anti-religion.

His first survey proved to be quite popular too. He announced the results on July 2, and people are still commenting on the post. Each time people come back to read and post new comments, it drives Berger's page views up. Plus, he is clearly building user loyalty, which is important for beat bloggers to do.

It is possible to get good traffic with one-way communication, but with two-way communication like Berger employs, he gets lots of repeat traffic. There are only so many people Berger can target for his blog (unique visitors), but there is no real limit to the amount of traffic he can get out of his most loyal users (visits, page views and time spent).

The better of a community that Berger builds, the more of his users that he can convert into loyal users that frequent his blog several times a day. But that requires actively engaging in two-way communication. Berger is very active in the comment section of his blog, and now he is trying online surveys for the biggest -- and often most controversial -- subjects in science.

Online tools that foment conversations help build user loyalty.

Guest blogging from community members

Patrick Thornton — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:02:35 -0700

So, you have a successful beat blog with a strong community and great two-way communication.

There is nothing more you can do to increase community involvement. Right? Several beat bloggers and news outlets would beg to differ. Some journalists are trying to take community involvement to the next level by allowing people to write guest posts.

Kent Fischer of The Dallas Morning News is beginning to accept guest posts for several reasons. First, he wants to get the community more involved in his blog on the Dallas Independent School District, and giving key community members a voice could help users feel more connected to his blog. After all, many of those people -- teachers, administrators, school board members -- are some of his most dedicated readers.

His second reason is a bit more pragmatic. Summer is a slow time for education reporters, and it can be difficult to come up with new content in the middle of summer break. Fischer is hoping that by allowing administrators, teachers and others to have a voice, it can keep his blog lively and engaging during the summer recess.

It seems like the perfect time of year to allow key people on his beat a chance to reflect on the past year and on what lies ahead. Fischer is hoping to get some of his first guest posts up this week, and Beat Blogging will be checking in on the experiment in the coming weeks to gauge its success. In the meantime, however, Fischer has been hoisting comments, which is another fantastic way to engage users (more on this community building technique to come later this week).

Matt Neznanski recently launched a new beat blog on sustainable living in Corvallis, Oregon. Sustainable living is a community-wide effort, which is why Neznanski is hoping to get as many community members as possible involved with the project. About 600 people showed up for a community meeting on sustainable living in April, which is a big reason Neznanski thought this new blog made sense.

Neznanski wants to harness that energy:

Our city’s focus on sustainability means that we as a news organization will be spending a lot of time with it and the best way to learn how to live green and understand sustainability would be to do so together.

Our Green City site will gather our reporting to tell you about local people doing inspiring things to foster sustainability and we’ll direct you to events to meet people and learn more about it.

Most importantly, we’re hoping to use this space to get a conversation started with people around Corvallis, Albany and Benton and Linn Counties who’ve got stories and information they want to share.

Print has long been a medium of one-way communication, where reporters and editors spoke to readers. The Internet, however, allows for community members to have a voice. Both Fischer and Neznanski believe that there are community members who know more about their beats than they do. Neznanski in particular is hoping to act more as a facilitator and moderator than as a traditional reporter on his blog.

So, why not actively court their knowledge? Good guest blogging is about is about getting those people who know more than you about your beat to share their insight.

Audio interview with Eric Berger on building an online community

Patrick Thornton — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:17:04 -0700

Eric Berger, the SciGuy over at the Houston Chronicle, has had success building a blog with a strong community around it.

Building a community requires hard work and dedication. It takes a blogger who embraces two-way communication. Just writing print stories online won't build a community, but it doesn't take crazy ideas to get people interacting on a blog.

"Simple things like ending a post with a question," Berger said. "Once you get people commenting, they feel compelled to come back."

Building a community involves a lot of reader interaction. Berger gets a lot of reader comments on his blog, and he moderates the blog himself. Plus, Berger tries to respond as much as possible to comments on his blog.

Moderating comments can take a lot of time, especially with contentious issues like global warming, intelligent design and others.

"It does take time to moderate, but it makes for a much better community," Berger said.

His paper has unmoderated comments on stories and the discussion and community isn't the same. Often the comments on stories quickly devolve into banal arguments. Berger believes interacting with users keeps the discussion more on topic and less inflammatory.

"If people know that someone is going to read what their writing and perhaps judge them, they'll be more careful with what they write," Berger said. "It's good in the sense that people recognize that there is going to be a presence of someone in there."

What hasn't worked for Berger: podcasting and video. He could do 3-4 blog entries in the same time he could do one video, and more people would look at the blog posts. Podcasting was a lot of effort for a few hundred people to listen to.

His blog, on the other hand, usually generates 100,000+ page views a month.

Berger also gives advice on why you should blog.

"It really does improve your reporting of the beat," Berger said.

But he cautions that if you don't want to blog and build a community, you won't be successful. Building a community takes time and effort. You have to want to do it.

Check out the full interview for Berger's thoughts on building an online community around a beat.

Click here to stream the interview. Or click here to download the MP3.

Something has to give to innovate on the Web

Patrick Thornton — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:28:33 -0700

A lot of journalists are being asked to do more in the same amount of time.

More stories, more blogging, more social networking, more video, etc. Brianne Pruitt posted on Wired Journalists about her paper's blogging and innovation woes:

Our bloggers are still expected to create the same amount of content for "the paper" ... but also fit in a vibrant, often-updated blog. It's just not working. Some bloggers rarely update, while others are killing themselves to "make it work."

Something has to give to innovate on the Web. That might mean less print work. It might mean hiring online-only employees.

But what Pruitt describes does not work. When I talk to the best beat bloggers, they all tell me they had to give up parts of their job.

That was the only way for them to become successful on the Web. Yes, many are working harder or longer hours, but they still had to give up some of their old duties.

Kent Fischer no longer does enterprise stories. Fischer misses those stories, but he knew he had to give something up in order to have a successful beat blog:

Yes, you make your day longer but you also stop doing stuff you did before. For me, the trade off is the enterprise reporting. Not every reporter is going to want to give that up, because generally that’s the fun, stimulating stuff. But for me, that’s what got dropped given the ridiculous amounts of daily news produced in a huge city school district that needs reporting.

Eric Berger usually writes 1-2 stories a week. During Hurricane season he might spend his entire day updating his blog with the latest news. And that means not doing print for a few days or so.

Ed Silverman rarely writes a print story. When Pharmalot started, the Star-Ledger envisioned it being an online-only enterprise. Pharmalot has found immense success because of dedication to the Web by Silverman and his editors.

All three of these beat bloggers have found success on the Web, and all three had to give something up in order to find success. Silverman started off blogging full time, but Fischer has gradually put more time and resources into his blog. Editors buy-in to successful products, and that's why Fischer might become a full-time blogger (or as he plans, a "blog on steroids," complete with database journalism and other features).

"My editors have accepted that I am doing less print work," Fischer said.

Fischer is on track for 500,000-1 million page views in his first year of blogging. Berger gets between 100,000-200,000 page views a month. And Silverman, with his world-wide audience, probably does quite a bit better than either of them (John Hassell, Silverman's editor, says that Pharmalot makes money).

That's real, palpable Web success. But they were only able to accomplish it because they gave up some or all of their print success.

The idea that news organizations can ask employees to wear more and more hats to do more and more work does not work. What works is admitting that we have to give up something in order to create something new.

Using a survey to take the conversation to the next level

Patrick Thornton — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:48:22 -0700

Eric Berger, the SciGuy, has a thriving community on his blog, with regular users, but he is always looking for ways to build a stronger community.

Berger, a beat reporter for the Houston Chronicle, often asks for users' input and uses his blog to build a community around his beat. I wrote a week ago that not every blog post needs to be about news. Some are about starting conversations, and that's what building a community is all about.

"It makes them feel apart of the community," Berger said about interacting with readers by using his blog to drive discussion and by responding to users' comments. "It's a sort of give and take as a conversation as opposed to a one-way street, which was the old model for news."

Berger found another way to take the discussion on his blog to a new level by using an online survey. When Pew released the results of its survey on religious beliefs in America, Berger saw an opportunity to compare the results of that national survey with what his readers believed. Not only are Berger's readers fans of science, but they are also Texans, which, according to Pew, are more devout than average Americans.

So, Berger made his own online survey for his readers to take using Survey Monkey. Hundreds did and the results are fascinating. Eric set out to answer this question:

If you're here, chances are you're interested in science. That would predispose most to accept evolution, I think. But what about the controversial notion that science leads one away from God?

The answer from his (non-scientific) survey is yes, science tends to lead people away from God. According to Pew, 71 percent of Americans are "absolutely certain" of their belief in God or a universal spirit, while 77 percent of Texans are absolutely certain. But just 47.8 percent of Berger's readers are absolutely certain.

Just five percent of people nationally "don't believe in God," while 24.4 percent of Berger's readers don't. The thing is, the results might not be quite what they seem to outsiders.

Berger says that many science blogs are outwardly anti-religion. What Berger sees from these results are that many of readers are religious -- probably more so than the typical science blog.

"It's a little bit different from a lot of national science blogs, which often take a pretty strong anti-religious approach," Berger said about the results from the survey. "I certainly wouldn't want to do that because I'd alienate a lot of readers."

Both posts (the original announcing the Pew results and the second announcing Berger's results) generated a lot of comments from readers. Berger used this opportunity to build a strong community and to introduce more interactivity into his blog.

What Berger did is the kind of thing a beat reporter couldn't do in print. With online tools like Survey Monkey, Berger can try new ways of communicating with readers. Most of these tools are pretty easy to use and often free (Survey Monkey is free for the first 100 responses).

Building a strong community of regular users is a great way to hone in on two important Web metrics: Time spent on a Web site and repeat traffic. Repeat visitors will drive up both page views and visits, which your business staff will love. Creating a survey doesn't take a lot of time, but it can have a monster effect on your traffic, especially repeat traffic as people discuss the survey results.

"The idea was basically another way to bring people in to feel connected, apart of the community, because the idea is that you want to build a base of regular readers -- people who come to your site every day," Berger said. "This was just another way for them to feel apart of the community."