I won’t speculate on the future, except to express my hope that the new organization serves the news business as well over the next 65 years as API has for the past 65. And to hope that it continues to employ my remaining API colleagues.

And I won’t dwell on the decline of API. It serves the newspaper industry, which has been in a freefall. I don’t know what could have been done to prevent the decline of an institute tied to an industry whose primary revenue source was declining. I have noted before that the industry did not do enough to follow the advice we presented in the Newspaper Next project. But I wish some newspapers would have tried everything we advocated. I think the business and API would be doing much better.

Where I want to focus in this post is on my gratitude to API for enriching my career and the careers of so many journalists and newspaper industry leaders. API has served the newspaper industry well.

I first became aware of API early in my career, when various editors left my newsrooms for a week or two and returned energized, with lots of new ideas for us to try. Nearly a decade ago, I was first invited (by Mary Glick, to whom I am eternally grateful) to be a discussion leader at an API seminar for city and metro editors. I led one of my leadership workshops and was energized myself by the discussion with the editors. I loved the staff, the experience and the facility and thought that I’d love to work there someday.

I returned a few more times as a discussion leader and in 2004 for API’s first “Train the Trainer” seminar, where Alan Weiss taught me a whole lot more about training and Carol Ann Riordan, API’s amazing bedrock for more than 25 years, taught by example about running a seminar. Again, I thought I’d love to work there someday, and soon I started making my pitch to do that.

Within a year, Drew Davis hired me as Director of Tailored Programs. I had a wonderful three-year run at API, taking me across the United States and Canada, as well as to Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Ecuador. I decided to move on in 2008, in part because of opportunities that beckoned and in part because I feared the future did not look bright.

I learned a lot at API and loved working there with Mary Peskin, Mark Mulholland, Elaine Clisham and other colleagues, with more than a hundred interesting clients and dozens of board members, consultants, partners, discussion leaders and seminar members.

Working at API was a delight and an honor. It will always be a cherished highlight of my career. I hope it remains so for my friends there.

In a recent email, Toni Sciacqua, Managing Editor – Digital at the Daily Breeze, Press-Telegram and Daily News in Southern California, shared a great example of Facebook engagement:

I wanted to share a big social media aha moment we had recently at the Daily Breeze that illustrates how listening to and engaging with the community can pay off in building a new audience and help us address issues the community is talking about.

We recently posted a question on Facebook asking followers to share their favorite community page. One commenter posted a link to “Life in Wilmington,” a FB page we weren’t aware of and weren’t following. The page had nearly 5,000 active fans. I asked a couple of reporters to start monitoring that page for news tips and engagement opportunities.

Larry Altman's Facebook profile photo

Crime reporter Larry Altman covered the story of a woman whose throat was slashed in Wilmington. We noticed that in the aftermath of that story, someone posted a rumor on the Life in Wilmington wall saying that another woman had been killed and police suspected a potential serial killer was on the loose. The item got more than 100 comments and was shared about 70 times over the next few hours.

Of course, if there were a serial killer roaming our area, we would want that story, right? So Larry got on the phone and found out there was no second victim and no reason to worry. He posted the comment to the LIW FB wall, hoping to allay the fears. That night, he picked up more than 100 new fans on his own FB page.

About the same time, LIW also posted a link to Larry’s story about the victim in advance of her vigil.

Traffic to our site spiked that evening after the posts, doubling our page views over the same day the week before, up about 120,000 page views. And traffic coming in from Facebook accounted for nearly 10 percent of our total traffic, also about double of normal.

Over the weekend, we noticed some negative comments about the inclusion of the victim’s criminal record in the follow-up story. In response to the criticism, Larry wrote a blog post responding to the complaints, that got a lot of immediate responses appreciative of the explanation.

But the rumor of a serial killer was still circulating, generating a lot of phone calls to our newsroom, the LAPD and more and more Facebook chatter. Larry decided to do a story about the rumors to finally put it to rest and calm fears in the community. Lest we alienate our new friends, we posted to their wall letting them know we admired their community involvement and that our story wasn’t meant to compromise what they’re doing.

Since then, we’ve posted several stories about their area to the wall, and they’ve given us a lot of feedback about our coverage. Overall, we’ve picked up about 200,000 page views on Wilmington-related stories in about two weeks. But more importantly, we’ve connected with a new group of readers who we hope will help us cover Wilmington better in the future.

This is a great example of how we can use existing community Facebook groups to build engagement with a new audience.

Thanks to Toni for sharing a detailed example of community engagement using Facebook (and to Larry for using Facebook so effectively). Larry and his Daily Breeze colleagues used several techniques that would be useful to many journalists:

• Identify Facebook pages in your community that you should be following.
• Use Facebook to ask questions about your community (and be sure you pay attention to the answers.
• Monitor community Facebook pages for possible news tips.
• Don’t post stories and comments just on your Facebook pages. Post them on community pages where people will find them relevant.
• Respond to reasonable criticism you see in social media.
• Rumors circulating on social media sometimes become stories worth addressing.

While I’m passing along Facebook advice, I’ll repeat this tip from the blog of my former TBD colleague Daniel Victor, who’s now leading social media efforts for ProPublica: Using images when posting stories to Facebook will increase the sharing. Don’t share a link that will just result in a thumbnail image; share a photo from the story, or create an image specifically for sharing on Facebook. You can add the link in the information you include with the photo.

Just as photos in print attract more readers to a story, sharing an image on Facebook draws more attention.

Update: A great cautionary tweet from Kim Bui. If you engage on other sites, you need to make it useful two-way engagement, not just spamming them with your links:

@virtualex @stevebuttry @edgaraguirre The spammy side of this is posting your stories on another orgs wall. Just to get exposure. Not cool.—
P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) January 25, 2012

@virtualex @stevebuttry @edgaraguirre One more: We tag other pages/people in our posts as much as possible. I find it strange most don't.—
P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) January 25, 2012

@stevebuttry There is a certain page that will soon be blocked from ours for this. Genuine engagement rocks, though.—
P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) January 25, 2012

Today’s chat will discuss the role of newsroom ombudsmen with four panelists with interesting perspectives on the topic:

• Arthur S. Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times. Brisbane (a former colleague from the Kansas City Star) stirred a lot of discussion recently when he asked whether Times reporters should be “truth vigilantes.” Among those responding to Brisbane were Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, Jack Shafer and Mathew Ingram.
• Patrick Pexton, Washington Post ombudsman, who also drew notice recently when he asked whether the Post innovating too fast. Here’s a Q&A with Pexton by Jay Rosen.
• Geneva Overholser, former Post ombudsman and Des Moines Register editor (we were colleagues at the Register before she was editor) and now director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.
• Craig Silverman, RegretTheError blogger for Poynter, who wrote some suggestions for updating the role of ombudsman, blogged about the response to Pexton by Raju Narisetti, outgoing managing editor in charge of the Post’s online operation, and about the response to Brisbane’s “truth vigilantes” piece. (Silverman and I have worked together on accuracy workshops for American and Georgetown universities.)

I hope you will join us for the chat and come back in weeks to come, both on Twitter and in the live chats on ASNE’s site.

In recent months, I’ve seen some good examples of Google+ use in some Digital First Media newsrooms. I asked my colleagues to explain what they did and how. Their responses are presented below, with minimal editing. (You’ll note that I’ve been hanging onto these examples quite a while. I’ve had more blog-post ideas than blogging time lately. I hope to catch up in the next few weeks.)

From Karen Workman of the Oakland Press:

The Oakland Press and The Macomb Daily made Michigan history Thursday, Dec. 22, by conducting the first editorial board meeting with a governor by using a Google+ hangout.

At each site, a reporter and editor used one computer — cutting down the number of computers helped to cut down lag time. Total computers including the governor equaled three. At The Oakland Press, a third staffer sat off-camera to listen and live Tweet the meeting. The Oakland Press also set up three Flipcams to capture the meeting from a variety of angles.

The end result included text stories, a Storify capturing the live Tweet and three videos.

In the future, we will look to livestream these as the Trentonian did with their election night coverage in place of shooting video. The live Tweet (we used #Snyder) was particularly well received by our followers — we received a lot of responses, commentary and retweets from our followers. Unfortunately, these did not get used in the Storify — another lesson learned for the next time around. In the future, we will also look to promote the live Tweet, including promotion of the hashtag #Snyder, in advance of the meeting.

The good news is that Gov. Rick Snyder was very pleased with the meeting and all parties are looking forward to increasing the amount of meetings and communication we can have using this new technology.

I love the resourcefulness and willingness to experiment shown in this account from Joe D’Aquila of the Trentonian:

The Google+ Hangout feature will eventually be a great tool for conducting interviews with guests in remote locations and panel discussions where several people can participate, and we can even invite the public to join in. The trouble right now is that there is no way to directly embed the video feed into our Web sites, so the only viewers that can watch or participate are on the limited G+ network itself. They are said to be working on a publicly available feature that will generate an embed code for exactly this purpose, and it will have some tie-in with YouTube so the feeds can be recorded. Once this comes out, it really will be a great journalistic feature.

Not wanting to wait for that, we’ve tried a few approaches to work around that problem. Our first try with this was on Election night back in November. We arranged to have candidates come in to the newsroom early in the day to discuss the election, then had a reporter go out to one of the campaign headquarters, where he’d be able to interview guests about some of the more interesting races all from the same place.

I originally was going to try and use the program ManyCam’s screen capture feature to feed the Google hangout screen into Ustream for an embeddable stream to host on our Web site. This would mean having a Google hangout running on a computer screen, ManyCam running to capture the screen, and UStream running, capturing the feed from ManyCam, while streaming it live and generating an embed code we could host on our site.

After trying it though, it seemed like the final version would look too choppy with herky-jerky movement not matching up to the sound correctly.

I don’t know how it came to me but I thought maybe we could just record the screen of one computer with a Web cam hooked up to another. I was still at home and talking to Managing Editor Joey Kulkin and our tech guy Ryan Boyle (using a google hangout no less) and we were going over what kind of equipment set-up we would need. Ryan said he thought it sounded like a horrible idea and that the quality would be very bad. He said he’d try to come up with a different plan while he went to lunch and I headed in to the office. When I got there, he showed me something he had been trying using Livestream, which has ManyCam built in, to stream the feed. This would eliminate the need to run ManyCam and a separate streaming program. It looked better than what I had done but was still fairly choppy.

So Ryan and I head back to the conference room, where I was going to set up my control booth. Ryan starts wiping off the screen of my laptop with a paper towel he finds lying around in the room. I said “wait, that would actually be visible to the viewers?” He said yeah because the camera would pick it up. I said, “Wait, camera? We are going to do that idea? I thought you said that sounded like an awful idea?”

I was still under the impression we were going to try his experiment with Livestream even though it was herky-jerky. But, even though he didn’t think my cam-to-screen idea was the greatest, he did concede it would be better than anything else we had available at that time.

So he wiped down the screen and we rigged up our “studio.”

We found some soda crates in the room and used them to prop up a web cam in front of my laptop’s screen. The camera was hooked to a desktop we lugged into the conference room. I started the Google+ hangout then positioned the camera to grab what I wanted. We used an audio patch cord that I just happened to have (one I use to hook an iPod to a portable boombox) and we used that to feed the audio from the laptop to the desktop-speaker jack-to mic jack. On the desktop we ran Ustream to create the embed code for the Web site.

I then set up a third computer, a notebook, to use as a monitor to watch what viewers on our Web site would see and listened in with a headset.

For the most part it worked pretty well, though the image wasn’t the greatest due to using the camera to film the screen.

The best use of the idea came later in the night with the reporter live from the field, which took some additional rigging to make sure his computer worked the way he needed it to. Again, it wasn’t perfect and we had some technical issues, but the ability to interview guests live in the field as an event was going on, with others back at the office able to join in the interview process was a very effective use of the technology.

This was the only part of the night that we “archived” in any way. Using Ustream I was able to make recordings of several of the interviews from our “control booth.” But the only one that really worked as a standalone piece, without the need for a lot of editing. It was a nice clean, several-minute long interview with a mayor who had just won re-election, really only minutes after he found out officially that he had won.

Since this first experiment we’ve continued to use Google+ Hangouts for interview purposes and we’ve improved our methods some, though it’s still very much a work in progress (one that will all be made moot once Google rolls out the embed option). But we’ve abandoned the filming the screen with a camera idea and gone back to Livestream. I’ve downloaded their “Procaster” desktop application that seems to have improved the picture and makes it much less jerky.

Joey Kulkin of the Trentonian, who may have been the first journalist to use Google+ effectively on a breaking news story, added this brief example of community engagement using a Hangout.

Hangout was crucial for myself and a guy in the community who didn’t like a tweet I posted under the Trentonian account. We went back and forth a bit, then I invited to engage in a conversation via the Hangout. Turns out, he’s a solid guy, a college student and mentor, who was helping an alternative school fill dozens of boxes with Thanksgiving meals for families of his students.

Turned out to be a great Hangout, two sides finding a common ground.

Do you have some other Hangout examples and tips (or other uses of Google+) to share?

I’ve blogged frequently about using Twitter’s Advanced Search function to find people in your community who are tweeting about a news incident. But Banjo finds people who are using social media nearby, even if they aren’t using the keywords that might show up in tweets about the incident.

In the story Andy was working on, a bomb scare at a shopping mall, he found someone who had just checked in at the King of Prussia Mall on Foursquare. Andy tweeted at him, asking if he was seeing anything. The person tweeted back that the Apple Store was packed and he hadn’t seen anything. So Andy was able to report that the whole mall was not being evacuated, a few minutes before he was able to reach a mall official to provide more detail.

Andy used other tools in the story, which he recounted using Storify.

BLOG: How @LansReporter staff used @Banjo to find local check-ins, tweets while crowdsourcing KOP bomb scare – bit.ly/yMhktI #DFM—
  (@AndyStettler) January 04, 2012

@ivanlajara Thanks. You're going to have a great time with @Banjo. Perfect for any breaking news, location-based crowdsourcing coverage.—
  (@AndyStettler) January 04, 2012

@ivanlajara Including music festivals, traffic accidents, fires, bombscares, public meetings, etc……everything.—
  (@AndyStettler) January 04, 2012

@ivanlajara @incrediblekulk It also lets you know when friends, followers have checked-in nearby which is helpful at times.—
  (@AndyStettler) January 04, 2012

Banjo from Banjo Inc on Vimeo.

Lisa tweeted and emailed recently about another lesson she learned about engaging with the community:

I "crowdsourced" and found my perfect Christmas story for all of you who knew I was on the hunt. You'll have to wait till Christmas to read.—
Lisa Fernandez (@ljfernandez) December 16, 2011

I also once vowed NEVER to use the word "crowdsourced."—
Lisa Fernandez (@ljfernandez) December 16, 2011

Lisa’s email to me last week told the story:

Each December, most reporters at the Mercury News avoid editor Mike Frankel, who has a gleam in his eyes as he hunts for the perfect Christmas story.

It may sound weird, but I actually love these hokey stories; they’re usually filled with hope and silver linings. So when “Frankel,” as we call him, came by my desk this year, he told me that he was upping the ante. He pitted me and two other reporters to find him the front-page story to run on Christmas morning. He’d buy the winner the lunch of their choice.

The competition was on. And I pulled out all the stops. Of course, I was prepared to use gum-shoe, old-fashioned techniques, like, uh, calling sources. But hoping to get results quickly, and also to branch out to potential new source avenues, I crowdsourced.

(As an aside, I must tell you that I hate all lingo, I especially hate social media lingo, and crowdsource is a word high on my yuk-list. To help alleviate the pain of the word, I liken “crowdsource” to “putting out a fetcher,” yet another journo slang word.)

Anyway, I put out a fetcher/teaser/call-to-action/call-it-what-you-will on the Merc’s Facebook account. And I tweeted to my followers and to the Merc’s followers that “reporter Lisa Fernandez is looking for the perfect Christmas story, something heartwarming, but not too schmaltzy. She’ll know it when she hears it.”

The “crowd” in this case, turned out to be one guy, the only call I received. It turned out to be a firefighter, whose friend had read the Merc’s Facebook page, and told him to give me a buzz. The call was a winner. The story, about firefighters surprising a disabled man with a tricked-out tricycle, ran on the front page on Christmas.

And I just enjoyed a nice restaurant lunch, complete with my favorite salmon skin sushi and futomaki, with Frankel this week.

I welcome the skepticism of veteran journalists such as Lisa who look askance at new tools such as Twitter and new terms such as crowdsourcing. I make the same point often in workshops, that a key task for reporters is finding the right sources for stories. Crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. But it often works and it’s usually worth a try. Even if you get just a single response, as Lisa did, sometimes you’re just looking for the right source.

If you’re a veteran journalist who’s learning some digital skills and overcoming some skepticism, I’d love to share some of your experiences as well.

Another excellent post, Steve. I totally agree about establishing a routine to check on digital sources. I do this every day (you are one of them) on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, etc.

What I love about using an interface such as HootSuite is the ability to set up various columns that search for people or hashtags or companies. This makes it easy to check every day. I’ve been doing this for a few years now. I’ve catagorized my searches. For example, I have the following (among others):

• Searches/companies
• Searches/fun stuff
• Searches/publishing
• Searches/writing
• Searches/people

Then under each of these searches you will find various columns. So, for example, under companies you will find: York Daily Record, YDR, Harley Davidson, Johnson Controls, Voith etc. I can go through these lists and see any tweet that these entities have been mentioned in.

Under the writing heading, you will find #yalit, #litchat, #amwriting, #writing, #kidlitchat, #writechat, #yalitchat, @AKA_Terrie (my agent) etc.

Under publishing headling: Egmontbooks, Simonschuster, etc.

Under people heading: SteveButtry, Jxpaton, #Joepa, Paterno, Jim McClure, Jimbradysp, Buffy Andrews etc.

Under fun stuff: #Rememberwhen etc.

You get the idea.

I find that this system is efficient, and I often find new sources and story ideas.

I’d love to hear how other reporters and editors use HootSuite, TweetDeck, Twitter lists and other tools to help bring some order to the chaos of the social media firehose. What do you do? Back to Buffy:

Another thing I want to mention is beat reporters reaching out to those they cover and having them “work for” them. For example, my religion reporter John Hilton, is asking every church (more than 600) to add his religion blog link to their church website. He is working his way through his list. I believe he is on “C” now. His link is beginning to appear on websites. How very cool is that?

That is cool. And I’m going to bet that, whether he’s doing that with emails or phone calls that it’s getting more than links. I’m sure people, whether they link to him or not, are also responding with tips and feedback, and every reporter needs that. Back to Buffy:

You talked about community engagement and that it doesn’t have to be purely digital. Again, I so agree. I’ve shared with you before about our community gatherings in which we invite people representing organizations, clubs, etc. to come into the newsroom and learn how they can be part of the digital first news gathering team. We have one coming up in February. We’ve incorporated more social media into this seminar and have found that people are thirsty for the knowledge and help.

Lastly, you are right on when you said that you don’t have all of the answers and that we want people to be innovative and lead us. You’ve given a lot of good advice on what reporters can do, but what I’d like to see is reporters (and copy editors etc.) telling us what we should be doing. Or, better yet, digging in and doing it. I always tell my people that I want them to see the ball, pick it up and run with it before I even know it’s there. This not only goes for the daily challenges of managing a staff but for new online initiatives that help expand and deepen our digital footprint.

In that initial post, I provided examples of how the approach would change the work of a court reporter, sports reporter, visual journalist, beat reporter and assigning editor. In response to a question from a colleague planning to hire a statehouse reporter, I blogged separately about how that reporter might work. On Twitter and in comments and emails, people asked me to explain how the Digital First approach might change the work of a business reporter, investigative reporter, lifestyle reporter and a reporter covering multiple beats.

Part of me wants to answer: You tell me. I haven’t been a business reporter in 20 years (though I have covered a few business stories since then). I was never a lifestyle reporter. A purpose of that blog post was to stimulate the discussion and experimentation of journalists so that you would answer those questions for yourselves and colleagues.

But more examples from me might stimulate more discussion and experimentation, so I’ll provide some answers, with this caveat: I’m not spelling out here how anyone should work. I’m suggesting things to consider as you decide how to work. Instead of going through each of the beats I was asked to address, as I’ve done with some of the others, I’ll list some questions and tasks any reporter should consider in working on any beat. I’ll answer them for some of the examples I was asked about, but the answers may be different for your beat.

If you want more help thinking through the Digital First approach to your beat, I provide suggestions by beat in my News University course, Introduction to Reporting: Beat Basics and Beyond.

What stories should you cover live?

If you’re a business reporter, you might liveblog annual meetings, product rollouts or press conferences. If you’re a lifestyle reporter, you could liveblog a community festival or a concert review (depends on the concert, venue and seating; you’re not going to liveblog from the front row of a darkened concert hall, but you could liveblog an outdoor concert or from the press box of a stadium or arena concert).

In a comment exchange on my blog post on working like a Digital First journalist, someone questioned the value of liveblogging. In my experience, liveblogging always draws some attention from readers. In the newspaper business, we have usually fallen short of providing the level of detail that the intensely interested reader wants. We provide more of the summary level of detail that satisfies the casually interested reader. But you attend events in full and take notes far beyond what you could publish in print. Liveblogging lets you satisfy the intensely interested reader without notably more work than it takes to do the summary for the casually interested reader. The liveblog in effect becomes your notebook (though I recommend actually keeping a notebook handy for things people do or say that you choose not to report immediately because you need to learn more before reporting them).

I recommend trying to report all events and breaking news stories live. Give your coverage some time to build interest, and make sure your site is promoting the event on your home page, and that you and your newsroom are promoting live coverage in social media. Monitor the traffic and engagement and determine as you go along what the interest level is (low traffic but high engagement would mean your work is worthwhile, as would high traffic and low engagement). You might learn that people are interested in live coverage of some types of events, but not others. (In which case, you also should monitor traffic and engagement on the summary coverage; the truth might be that people just aren’t interested in that type of event at all.)

When I say “liveblog” here, I mean either liveblogging directly into a program such as CoverItLive or ScribbleLive, frequently updating a story, frequently updating a curation tool such as Storify or Storyful, or live-tweeting, which you can feed into CoverItLive or ScribbleLive. Or maybe you pretty much know what is going to happen and what the big issues at a company’s product-rollout or annual meeting will be (perhaps you had an embargoed preview of a new product being announced), and you write much of the story in advance, updating with some actual quotes and description of the event. Determine the right liveblogging approach for your beat and for each individual story.

Liveblogging isn’t the only form of live coverage. You might also livestream an event, either instead of liveblogging or in addition, embedding both on the same page.

How should you use a beatblog?

You want to engage with two segments of the public: those with casual or occasional interest and those with intense and continuing interest. Your stories meet the first need. Your beatblog meets the second need. You might write a longer draft of a story for the beatblog, including more detail and covering some points that won’t interest the average reader. You invite feedback on the blog and then start cutting for the story that will run on the website and in the print edition. (This might take a little more time, but my experience is this is how many reporters write anyway, except that they don’t publish these drafts.)

Your beatblog is a place to interact with people who care the most about the community or topic you cover: Ask for story ideas or angles, seek sources, seek feedback.

Posts in your beatblog can be as brief as a link to someone else’s blog or news story (even the competition’s), with a question or comment. If the competition is following you on a story, don’t boast that you were there first. Link to their story and ask whether this angle is significant enough that you should pursue it, or whether people know of a better angle to pursue. If the competition beat you on the story, ask for suggestions for angles you should pursue.

If you get a database to analyze, you might post it to the blog, invite people to look through it and tell you what they see of significance.

Make your beatblog the place to learn everything about the topic you cover.

This is a tougher question for the reporter covering multiple beats. You won’t be able to go into as much depth on any one beat as would be ideal for a beatblog. You might want to have a separate beatblog for each beat. But I recommend a personal reporting blog. In your “about” page, you describe the beats you cover. You set up a major category for each beat, and encourage people to bookmark the category pages they are interested in.

For some beats, a Facebook page might work better than a beatblog. Or a robust Twitter presence may suffice. Discuss with your editor and experiment to find the right approach to serve people with high interest in the topic(s) you cover.

Who are the sources you should check with regularly?

You answer this question on at least two levels: duration and frequency. Some you should check with as long as you are in your beat and they are in their jobs. Some you check with for the duration of a particular story where they become important. Some you check with daily or weekly, some just occasionally.

For instance, when I was covering agribusiness for the Kansas City Star, I touched base frequently (every week or two, I’d say, though it’s been a long time) with sources such as the press aides for the Kansas and Missouri agriculture departments and the state or regional offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Same with the public relations people for major agribusinesses based in Kansas City. I would touch base less often with those people’s bosses: The agriculture secretaries, state or regional directors of USDA agencies and CEOs of the agribusinesses.

When I covered a merger involving the Union Pacific Railroad for the Omaha World-Herald, working with our regular transportation reporter, I touched base frequently with a UP spokesman and some railroad experts and state and federal officials. But when the merger was complete, I never talked to them again. The transportation reporter stayed in touch with most of those local sources because he continued covering the railroad. But some of the national experts he used in the merger story moved to occasional contacts, if ever.

A general-assignment lifestyle reporter might not have as many regular sources as a reporter with a beat structured around agencies, industries or topics. But if you’re covering TV, you touch base regularly with local station managers (or their public affairs directors). If you’re an arts reporter, you touch base frequently with leaders of various arts agencies, managers of local galleries and venues, etc.

How do sources like to communicate?

Learn how sources like to be contacted. Get their cell phone numbers and learn whether they respond to text messages and whether it’s OK to call on evenings and weekends. Learn whether they respond more quickly to an email, voice mail or direct messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Even if they use electronic messaging of some kind, be sure to talk in person and on the phone frequently. But it’s essential to know the best way to get a quick answer.

What digital sources should you follow?

Personal contact with sources is important, but you also should set up regular (and story-specific) digital checks. Make a list (or several) of agencies and individuals on your beat using Twitter, and make that a regular column you check on TweetDeck (or Twitter lists or whatever Twitter client you use). Save routine searches for Twitter mentions of people or agencies on your beat. If appropriate, you can narrow the searches to just your community or region using Twitter’s advanced search function.

For instance, the reporter who asked me about multiple beats covers a particular community as well as a couple regional topical beats. If the community has a distinctive name, such as Torrington, you might have a search for the community name, with no geographic restriction on the search. This will turn up tweets from people outside your community talking about Torrington or from local people who have not enabled location on their Twitter accounts. But if you’re in a community with a more common name, such as Charleston or Troy, you want to use a location-narrowed search. If you work at the Oakland Press in Pontiac, Mich., it may be important to narrow the search, because you don’t want your search cluttered with tweets about Oakland, Calif., or random tweets about Pontiac automobiles (but if you’re covering the auto beat, that’s a different question).

Identify Facebook pages of organizations on your beat. You can “like” them so that their updates appear in your news feed. You may want to note in your profile or in an update that you’re doing so to monitor their news, not an endorsement. Or you can just make a point to visit their pages regularly (you may want to do that anyway, so you don’t miss their posts that don’t appear high in your feed).

Investigative reporters especially should be careful in “friending” sources who want to remain confidential. You will have some on-the-record sources who occasionally go off the record, and it’s fine to be friends with them. But if someone contacts you in complete confidence and is never on the record, avoid friending that person on Facebook and consider whether you should follow him or her on Twitter. If Facebook had been a reporting tool during Watergate, imagine how damaging it would have been in people had been able to see Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”) in Bob Woodward’s friend list.

Connect with sources on LinkedIn. On a slow news day, you might want to verify some officials’ résumés (if you catch one exaggerating or lying outright, you have a good story). If some people have synced their accounts with TripIt or SlideShare, you might monitor their travel plans or presentations. A trip to a rival company’s headquarters might be your first indication of negotiations for a partnership or merger. Slides might provide a good illustration for a story.

How should you crowdsource?

Traditional investigative reporting is often a secretive pursuit, with reporters playing cards close to their vests and spending large amounts of time trying to build networks of sources. You still need to build networks, and sometimes you may need to be secretive, but crowdsourcing can speed the process and connect you with sources you might not find the traditional way.

Use social media, your website and print to pose carefully crafted questions to the public. You want to show that you know something about the topic without publishing facts you haven’t verified yet.

Don’t pose the questions in a way that people will regard this as asking them to help you do your work. Invite them to tell their stories. Appeal to their sense of justice. Sources are not interested in helping investigative reporters. But they are outraged about injustices they know about. They may be willing to help someone tell the world about the wrongdoing that is weighing on their consciences or stirring their anger.

Some traditional journalists are uneasy about crowdsourcing, feeling that a public appeal will tip off competition or the target of an investigation. Those may be valid concerns in some cases, but most of the time, a target learns pretty quickly that you are on the trail. And crowdsourcing can help you jump ahead of competition that often is working the same story, too. The most effective crowdsourcing is bold but careful. You often can address your concerns in how you word your appeal to the crowd.

Some stories do not lend themselves well to crowdsourcing. If you are investigating allegations of sexual abuse against someone, for instance, you shouldn’t crowdsource that story in the early stages, because even asking the question could unfairly damage someone’s reputation. However, when you have the allegations nailed down enough to publish, be sure to include a crowdsourcing appeal, letting other victims know how to contact you.

The value of crowdsourcing in investigative reporting has been demonstrated for several years now. The 2006 story by the Fort Myers News-Press, uncovering outrageous charges for sewer and water hook-ups in Cape Coral, Fla., and the 2007 Talking Points Memo investigation of the firings of U.S. attorneys, which eventually forced the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, were early examples of crowdsourcing. It works, and if you’re not using it in investigative reporting, you’re not as good an investigative reporter as you could and should be.

Crowdsourcing can be effective in feature stories and daily stories, too. If a new product is being released, you can ask on your Facebook or Twitter accounts who is standing in line to buy it, or what they think of it. Ask about plans for a holiday or opinions about a current issue, and you will quickly come up with sources.

An annual feature is a Veterans Day story. At TBD.com, we crowdsourced that story by inviting people, using a Google map and a #wheretheyserved hashtag, to tell the stories of their military service or service of their loved ones.

Lifestyle reporters often work stories that require finding a source in a particular circumstance – patient with a disease in the news, parent searching for the hottest toy of the holiday season, someone trying the hot diet or latest exercise device. Crowdsourcing can often save you time in finding these sources.

Similarly, business reporters often need to find employees or customers of a particular business, and can save time by crowdsourcing.

What data can help tell your coverage?

Data analysis is helpful on any beat. Regulatory agencies and national associations have valuable data on businesses. (Check out all the data provided by the National Newspaper Association.) Many investigative stories have their roots in data analysis that debunks lies or uncovers inequities or failures. Lifestyle reporters may find or support stories through analysis of data about health issues or nonprofit funding.

On every story, whatever your beat, you should ask what data might help you understand or tell your story. Monthly, quarterly or annual reports provide important business stories. Don’t simply accept the analysis (think of it as spin) that business or regulatory agencies give to the data. Acquire the data yourself and find what they are missing, omitting or misrepresenting.

If you don’t have data skills, it’s time to start learning how to access and analyze data. I hope your newsroom will provide some training for you. But, as I recounted recently in a guest post for Buffy’s World, I did my first analysis on an investigative story by entering data myself in an Excel spreadsheet and using the Excel tutorial to do some simple analysis. You can start on your own and acquire skills as you work on subsequent stories.

Work to develop your data skills, and seek ways to collaborate with colleagues who have advanced skills.

Discuss whether this data would have lasting value beyond this story. Can it be a standing database on your site (I prefer the term answerbase, because the value of data is in the answers you can provide to community questions)? What do you need to do to keep it updated? Maybe you acquire new data monthly and add it to your database. Maybe you (or a colleague) can write a script to “scrape” new data automatically from a public agency’s site.

Consider whether your story would be helped by data visualization. Visual.ly and VIDI offer helpful data-viz tools.

How do you engage the community?

Of course, one of the answers here is crowdsourcing, as I’ve already discussed, but there are other ways to engage the community. You might host a live chat the day your story runs, either with one of your sources or just inviting community questions and comments. Or maybe a live chat is part of your crowdsourcing effort as you’re working on the story. You might host a live chat in advance of a holiday or big event, asking people how they celebrate the holiday or what they expect from the event. This chat might produce story ideas or sources. Or maybe it’s just an engaging part of your coverage.

Think of hashtags to use in connection with stories as you tweet about them. You can use a hashtag already in use in the community, engaging with the people who are using it. Or you can promote a regular hashtag that covers recurring news in your community: Maybe #detauto if you cover the auto industry in Detroit or #bayhealth if you cover health in the San Francisco Bay area. The hashtag will help people follow your tweets about your beat, but you also may prompt people to start using it for their own tweets, questions and news about the topic. Or you could promote a hashtag for discussion of the issue you cover in a particular story (before or after publication or during the run or a series).

If you’re trying to decide between two leads, publish them both on your beatblog or on Twitter or Facebook, and invite feedback. Before a big interview with a CEO or a visiting celebrity, ask the community to suggest questions.

Despite our Digital First emphasis, engagement doesn’t have to be entirely digital. Promote hashtags and live chats in the print edition (and print curated digital content). Engage with the community in person, by attending community events or announcing on social media that you’ll be working at a particular time in a particular coffee shop, interested in hearing from the public.

How should you use video?

These considerations are the same as the ones I cited for statehouse reporters. You could use video in a variety of ways, regardless of your beat:

• Coordinate with a visual journalist who works the video coverage of a story as you work the text coverage.
• Livestream events from your smartphone or laptop.
• Shoot brief video clips during interviews or events to upload with minimal editing along with text coverage.
• Use video heavily in your reporting for a story that works best as a video, with strong editing.
• Gather videos from other sources (community submissions, social media, security cameras, state agencies) to embed in your stories and/or link to.

What content should you curate?

Curation is an essential skill and task on nearly any beat. A business reporter might curate the response to a major layoff by a local business. A lifestyle reporter might curate tweets, photos and videos from a community festival, or discussion relating to nearly any holiday. As I said in the statehouse post, sometimes curation will be one of many reporting techniques you use as you pursue a story. Sometimes it will be the primary form of a story. You might use a curation tool such as Storify or Storyful or simply embed tweets or other media into a blog post.

Curation may be an especially important part of the work for the reporter with multiple beats. On those days when you have good stories to cover on multiple beats, you might cover the situation that others might be ignoring and use Storify to quickly curate blog posts, tweets and coverage by competing reporters (perhaps adding a little original reporting from a phone call or two).

How can you report unfolding stories?

Again, I described in detail in the post on statehouse reporting, an approach to reporting daily stories as you nail down the facts. The old process of gathering your facts and then publishing a completed story is not usually the right process for a Digital First newsroom. If you write a single, complete story, it often will come at the end of a process that involves several updates covering developments through the day (or over several days). The details will vary by beat and by story, but almost any beat reporter needs to work on techniques for telling the unfolding story.

What are priorities for your beat?

You should discuss with your editor(s) the priorities for your beat. How much should your coverage be event-driven and how much should be enterprise? How much enterprise should be daily and short-term and how much should you pursue long-term stories? What should be your mix of feature stories and news coverage?

These are especially important discussions for the reporter covering multiple beats. You need to discuss roughly how much of your time should be spent covering each of the beats. Discuss some possible (or actual) situations where more than one of your beats presents situations worth covering. Which of your beats is most important or which type of story is most important? You’ll have to repeat these discussions sometimes as difficult conflicts arise, but a general discussion of priorities will help guide your daily work.

If your answer from your editor is that everything is important, press for more and better guidance. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. These decisions aren’t always easy, but they are always important.

How do you feed the print edition?

The demands of “feeding the daily beast” have been a significant obstacle in the development of digital journalism. Digital First Media makes no bones about the relative priorities of digital and print platforms: Digital comes first, print last, both in processes and in priorities.

Decide the best way to reflect those priorities in your work. If you are covering the annual meeting of a local company and liveblogging throughout the day, maybe you just write a fairly brief summary for the print edition, plugging the full coverage online for those who want more. Or maybe the print story looks forward in some fashion or provides analysis, if the meeting merits such coverage and if you can provide it.

If you’re an investigative reporter, this may mean that instead of working with an artist on an elaborate print graphic explaining a process or issue, you work on a digital interactive project to accomplish the same thing (and the print story encourages people to check out the online graphic). Instead of planning a huge Sunday story, or a series starting on Sunday, you start the project on Monday, when it can dominate office conversations, and drive web traffic, through the week. Or maybe it runs online through the week, wrapping up with a big print package on Sunday.

What’s the right approach for your beat?

I’ve raised some questions here, but your answers will vary by beat, by story and by where you are on the Digital First learning curve. I recognize that most reporters, including those working for Digital First Media, don’t yet have all the skills being discussed here, and aren’t yet fully following the processes I’ve described here. Discuss with your editor what you’re already doing well and what you need to work on next. Editors, discuss with reporters what they should do to pursue a Digital First course (and how that changes your work).

I welcome feedback from reporters and editors about the questions raised here. How are you answering them? What are other questions Digital First reporters should be asking?

Here are slides I am using for the workshops I am leading this week about working as a Digital First journalist. I use the first few slides and then may go to some other slides depending on the discussion that unfolds as I talk to the group about their jobs and how these questions might shape their work.

An editor asked me to outline how a Digital First statehouse reporter should work.

I see nine themes for the digital emphasis of a statehouse reporter:

1. Live reporting of events.
2. Community engagement around the issues and events of the Capitol.
3. Reporting breaking news and enterprised scoops as the stories unfold.
4. Curation of content from other sources.
5. Enterprise and daily reporting based on analysis of data compiled by state agencies.
6. Video reporting of interviews and news events.
7. Mapping.
8. Digitally focused enterprise reporting.
9. Beatblogging.

I’ll elaborate on them, but need to acknowledge up front that I’m not involved directly with statehouse coverage now, so some statehouse editors and reporters could certainly explain any or all of these points better than I could. This continues the discussion I started last month with a post on the workflow of a Digital First journalist.

I also am not under illusion that many, if any, statehouse reporters are working as I describe now, or have the skills or equipment to do so. I don’t present this as a yardstick by which to measure current performance, but a goal to pursue in training, changing workflow and updating equipment. If you hire a statehouse reporter today, she should be hired and equipped to work this way immediately to the extent she has the skills, with a commitment to work on developing any skills she lacks.

Let’s discuss those themes:

Live reporting

Much of statehouse reporting, especially during a legislative session, revolves around events such as committee meetings, hearings, press conferences, debates and votes. For every event worth the attention of a statehouse reporter, a group of readers will be interested in live coverage and the reporter should develop skills at live-tweeting and/or liveblogging (my recommendation is to live-tweet and feed those into your news site and/or beatblog using a widget or a service such as CoverItLive or ScribbleLive).

Set up your live-tweeting with a tweet or two giving context by saying that you will be live-tweeting the hearing of a particular committee or the debate on a bill. Use a hashtag, either a standing tag you can reuse again and again (#njgov or #colegis) or a specific tag identifying the issue (#mnroads) or both. The set-up tweets warn followers that a heavy flow of tweets is coming. You can suggest that they might want to follow the hashtag on TweetChat or, if not interested, filter the heavy flow using muuter. (Another approach might be to have a separate feed, as the New Haven Register does with @nhrlive. Everyone who follows that expects the live-tweeting firehose. From your beat Twitter account, you say that you’ll be live-tweeting on the live feed, and you might retweet a few key tweets.)

Tweet the key quotes, votes, news developments, etc. But you’re not transcribing; you’re reporting. Use some news judgment. Stop the flow as needed to do some reporting, such as buttonholing the person who just testified to ask a couple of your own questions. Don’t just tweet what’s happening in front of you. If someone says something that you can confirm, refute or place in context with a link, look up the related site quickly and tweet a link.

Statehouse reporters often juggle more than one event in a day. If you’re bailing on a hearing after some key testimony, tweet that you’re leaving that event but will start soon from the next one.

Discuss with your editor whether you should take a straight reporting approach or whether some analysis or commentary is acceptable or encouraged regularly or in particular circumstances. A statehouse is a place of considerable snark and humor. Discuss with your editor how much your tweets should reflect the snark and humor of the statehouse characters and/or whether you should contribute to snark and/or humor.

Tweeting isn’t the only way to provide live coverage. You can livestream video. A livestream can be anything from a high-end camera on a large tripod (perhaps operated by a visual journalist, rather than the statehouse reporter) to a smartphone on a small tripod (or even handheld) using an app such as USTREAM, Qik or Skype. Or you can livestream from your laptop’s camera, sometimes turning the laptop around to show the action on the floor and sometimes letting it face you, while you provide running play-by-play and/or commentary. You can use Google+ Hangout to do live interviews with politicians (the Oakland Press and Macomb Daily recently had an editorial board meeting with Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder by Hangout).

Community engagement

You want to engage the community through social media and your beatblog on at least two levels:

1. Connect efficiently with the sizable group of capital insiders who have always been heavy readers of statehouse coverage. These are your sources, officials, state workers, political activists, lobbyists and the like. You will continue to work sources privately in face-to-face conversations, phone calls and digital communication. But you broaden your circle of insiders by crowdsourcing confirmation of tips. Let’s say you get a tip that the director of the state department of transportation (we’ll call him Dusty Rhodes) is leaving. Your tipster isn’t sure why Rhodes is leaving, doesn’t know firsthand and won’t tell you who told her. The traditional approach would be to call some of your sources at DOT and the governor’s office to try to get confirmation of the departure, learn whether Rhodes quit or is being fired and learn why he’s leaving. You still want to do that, but before you call (or as you’re on hold or waiting for someone to return your call), you tweet (and post to Facebook and your beatblog) something that engages the community without spreading rumors: “Anyone know what’s up with Dusty Rhodes at DOT?” Maybe you get nothing and you’re going to have to nail this down old-school through your established sources. But maybe someone you’ve never met comments on your Facebook page that Rhodes just told DOT staff that he’s accepting a job with the federal DOT. Maybe the community feedback is solid enough to provide confirmation or maybe it just adds focus to your old-school inquiries. And you add another DOT source or two for future stories.
2. You want to connect with the general public – people who care enough about their taxes, services or issues affected by state government that they follow your blog and/or social feeds. By engaging them, you gain insight on the impact of state government and they help steer you toward more relevant reporting. Sometimes this will be a question on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and/or your blog, asking how they will be affected by proposed legislation. Other times, you might host a live chat or webcast on a topic you’re covering. The live chat can simply be a conversation between the reporter and the community. Or you can bring your insiders together with the general public by interviewing a source on a live chat, asking some questions yourself and fielding questions from the community that you ask the source (and possibly answer yourself).

Breaking news and scoops

As soon as you confirm newsworthy facts, you report them. Your standard of accuracy doesn’t change, but your standard of completeness is upside down from the print standard. You may never write an actual story, but provide a steady stream of information. As Jeff Jarvis has noted, a story today is more a process than a product. Much of the news at a state Capitol – such as appointments, firings, resignations, reports, budget cuts, tax increases – dribbles out in tips, trial balloons and updates.

Developing that DOT story, your first mention is not a report at all, just a question and an appeal for information, maybe about 9 a.m. when you first get the tip. About 9:30, you get a confirmation the chairman of the House Transportation Committee. She got an email heads-up from Rhodes himself, but the email didn’t explain, and she hasn’t been able to raise Rhodes or the governor on the phone yet to learn details. You report that basic fact, attributed to the lawmaker, saying you’re still trying to find out why and where Rhodes is going (and you ask if anyone knows why).

You also pull up a couple key quotes from the profile you wrote last year when Rhodes was appointed and post a link to the profile. You embed a video that was part of that profile in your blog post.

Soon you get an email blast to the statehouse media from the governor’s office, saying he’s having an 11 a.m. press conference about the DOT. You report this fact, too, again asking if anyone knows more details.

You reach Rhodes’s deputy director and she confirms that he’s leaving to head the Federal Highway Administration. She says he just told his inner circle at DOT and will be meeting with the full staff at 10:30. You report that and hustle over to the employee meeting. On your way over, Rhodes replies to a text message you sent out earlier, confirming the move and calling it his “dream job.” You quickly post this quote from your smartphone, repeating the link to your earlier profile.

If you can get into the DOT employee meeting, you live-tweet it (or maybe livestream it from your smartphone). If you can’t get into the meeting, you buttonhole some employees as they come out. You follow Rhodes over to the governor’s office for the press conference, asking him a few questions as you walk and tweeting a few more quotes from him.

You live-tweet or livestream the governor’s press conference.  Or maybe you live-tweet most of it but do a brief video clip of the announcement itself.

The details will vary with each story, but you develop the routine of reporting the unfolding story, the bursts of reporting and writing alternating and even happening simultaneously.

You need to develop your own workflow for how you update various platforms. I suggest something like this: When you get the basic newsworthy fact – Rhodes’s resignation – you probably tweet it right away, text your editor to send a news alert and write a quick blog post of a paragraph or two announcing the basic fact. You blog that you’ll be updating as you learn more and add a Twitter widget or CoverItLive or ScribbleLive module to the blog post to feed subsequent tweets. You text the editor that the blog post is up, so she can put it on the home page. You tweet a link to the blog post and write brief updates for Facebook, Google+ and/or LinkedIn, posting links to the blog post and saying you’ll be updating through the day. From there, Twitter becomes your basic reporting platform. It will update the blog automatically, and all the other platforms link to the blog. However, you might update Facebook when you nail down the federal appointment and to note that you’ll be live-tweeting the press conference.

By early afternoon, you’ve pretty much covered the unfolding story of the resignation/appointment, without ever actually writing a whole story. And maybe you never write that as a whole story. Maybe you confer with your editor and decide the story will be looking forward or analyzing: Who are possible replacements or what did Rhodes achieve at DOT or why did he get the appointment. You already have some of what you need for that from the press conference and the interviews you’ve already done and previous stories. You do another two or three interviews and by mid- to late afternoon, you’re writing the analysis, which will go up as a blog post as well as a print story for the next morning’s newspaper.

Curation

Curation won’t necessarily be an major task every day, but many stories might lend themselves to curating content from other sources – social media, other professional media, your archives, blogs and other web content. Sometimes curation will be one of many reporting techniques you use as you pursue a story. Sometimes it will be the primary form of a story.

Let’s return to the DOT example: The link to the archived profile and embedding the video is an example of curation. You also might pull in Rhodes’s tweet or Facebook update if he announces his resignation/appointment at some point on social media. Or if the DOT’s PR person posts a press release, that might become part of the curated content. If politicians and members of the public react in blogs and/or social media, you might curate that content. If Rhodes led the DOT for a couple decades, maybe you curate photos through the years (from your archives and/or the web) and do a slideshow that shows his hair receding and/or graying through his time on the job. If a competitor reports a significant development, you note that and post a link.

You can do most of this using a curation tool such as Storify or Storyful or simply by embedding tweets or other media into a blog post. Maybe you decide that your afternoon task, rather than doing the analysis piece, is going to be to curate social-media discussion into a sidebar.

Or maybe the resignation/appointment isn’t the only statehouse story of the day (it would be a rare day for a statehouse reporter if that was the case). Maybe you conferred with the editor in the late morning when you learned about a plan to change the formula for state aid to schools and decided to use AP for your reporting on the school story. But by early afternoon, you decide that the school story is more important than that forward-looking or analytical piece. You might decide to use a summary story that you can write quickly or that an editor can pull together from your digital content for the Rhodes story. AP has a decent basic story on the schools, but you notice there’s some strong reaction on Twitter to the school story, positive, negative and even humorous. You decide to curate that response with a quick Storify roundup to accompany the AP story.

Data analysis

Offices across the capital are storehouses of data for daily stories and enterprise, ranging from state spending to bridge inspections to causes of death to hunting licenses to nursing home inspections to leaking gasoline storage tanks.

The statehouse reporter needs strong data skills. On a breaking story, you know where to find the data that will quickly explain the extent of a problem or to confirm or refute the spin of state officials. On a slow day, you troll through some databases to find a fun quick-hit story on the most popular baby names in the state last year or to find the nugget of an enterprise story on declining math test scores.

Sometimes your use of data might be a quick query of a database to add a key detail to a story. You might use tools from Visual.ly or VIDI to visualize statistics included in a report or announcement. Other times, you will spend a few hours or days (perhaps working with a developer) working up an interactive database that will be the heart of a story. Or you might work weeks on a project (probably between legislative sessions) that will involve data analysis and shoe-leather reporting based on the findings of your analysis. Or you could develop a standing interactive database that you update periodically as the state updates its data (or that updates automatically by “scraping” data from the state’s site using a script you or a developer write).

Video reporting

The statehouse reporter might use video in several ways (some of which I’ve already mentioned):

• Coordinate with a visual journalist who works the video coverage of a story as you work the text coverage.
• Livestream events from your smartphone or laptop.
• Shoot brief video clips during interviews or events to upload with minimal editing along with text coverage.
• Use video heavily in your reporting for a story that works best as a video, with strong editing.
• Gather videos from other sources (community submissions, social media, security cameras, state agencies) to embed in your stories and/or link to.

Mapping

The state map will be a frequent part of a statehouse reporter’s work. Sometimes you’ll upload county data to a state map to embed with a story (I saw several such maps of Iowa on caucus night). You might work with a developer on a complex interactive map, or you might make a quick Google map yourself. In the DOT story, you might quickly highlight on a Google map two or three highways that were built or upgraded on Rhodes’s watch, and a new airport terminal that he helped secure funding for.

Enterprise reporting

The statehouse reporter’s enterprise reporting uses a combination of the techniques covered here already. You may crowdsource multiple questions at different stages of an enterprise story. Data will play a factor in many enterprisers. The longer time frame of some enterprise stories may lend better to the time required for editing a polished video.

The enterprise story may unfold in stages, rather than the traditional huge Sunday package or series that you publish after weeks or months of work. You might publish two or three news stories at different times as you uncover some of the key findings of an enterprise project. Each of those stories might be a crowdsourcing opportunity to seek input from the community. Maybe a live chat on one of the issues you raise will be part of the project. Rather than making a big splash suddenly from nowhere, your big story may be the culmination of several stories. But even the big story, if an enterprise project has one, probably won’t be the end. You might host a live chat after you publish it, or write a follow-up or two from tips that come in the comments or social media discussion your story generates. If you’ve produced an investigative piece that spurs legislative hearings or press conferences, you might liveblog them.

Beatblog

The statehouse reporter’s beatblog should become must-read journalism for politicians, state employees, interest groups, activists, lobbyists, statehouse journalists and others with strong interest in state government. In a state capital, that’s a significant section of your community. Voters and readers at large may not check the blog as often. More likely they will be occasional visitors, steered there by a link from your home page when you’re covering big news, or when they Google a topic you’re writing about or when a friend’s Facebook post calls their attention to your coverage of an issue they care about.

However people find the blog, it should be the home of nearly everything a statehouse reporter does, whether it’s a long takeout that’s going to run in the print edition or a breaking news bulletin or a bunch of tweets on a widget or an insider tidbit that won’t appear anywhere but the blog. Posts worthy of home-page or politics-page play might be written as news stories, but they will be posted to the blog, where these people with strong interest will look for everything. Links from the home page and social media will drive less-frequent visitors to these big stories.

A print story might appear in the blog in various iterations: bulletins and unfolding coverage during the day, then a post seeking community feedback on which approach to take in the print story or asking which of two leads readers like, then a draft of the story, maybe an hour before the print deadline, then the final version, posted to the blog when you turn it in to the editor (and thanking readers for their feedback, if you used some of their suggestions).

I try to avoid saying “never,” but I can’t imagine a reason that a Digital First statehouse reporter would “save” anything for the print edition. Even print-focused stories would be posted in draft form and/or final form to the blog first.

In some newsrooms, or on some occasions, the reporter might not actually write a print story, but an editor might pull together print content from the liveblogging and iterative reporting.

Other matters

As with my other posts about Digital First journalism, this is not a one-size-fits-all mandate prescribing exactly how you should work. Each journalist will take his own approach to the work I’ve described here, and each workday will produce challenges and opportunities that I haven’t anticipated here. The details will vary depending on whether you’re a solo reporter or part of a statehouse team. They will vary based on the circumstances of the state and capital you cover.

Statehouse reporting tends to have two primary focuses: Covering the work of state government and covering state political campaigns and elections. I have focused mostly here on government coverage, but the same themes would play into political coverage with minor adjustments. Some of the suggestions here might apply for topical beats with some statehouse duties (for instance, the DOT story might be covered by a transportation reporter, not a statehouse beat reporter). For Washington coverage, the approach would be similar, though the details might change considerably.

If this process sounds daunting, regard it as a goal, not a minimum standard. Some excellent statehouse reporters might be weak on database or video skills. Every Digital First journalist must be in a constant state of learning. Your newsroom may not provide you with a smartphone. Even if you master all the skills you need today and have all the equipment, some other important tool will be introduced tomorrow. What’s most important is that the reporter should understand and embrace the Digital First mindset and process, commit to learning new skills and press bosses to provide needed equipment.

I’ve supervised or pitched in as a reporter on print-focused coverage of five different statehouses, though it’s been a while since I’ve had much involvement in state coverage. I welcome statehouse reporters and editors (either my Digital First Media colleagues or others) to weigh in with your observations and experiences, which may be more helpful. Send me links to good beatblogs by statehouse reporters or good liveblogging examples, Twitter usernames of good statehouse reporters. Let me know where you think my suggestions would be impractical (though I may push back, if you haven’t given them a good test; the Digital First statehouse reporter, like all Digital First journalists, needs to embrace a workflow that’s radically different from print-focused journalism).

Digital First Media has newsrooms in at least five state capitals and other newsrooms cover statehouses. I’ll be asking those colleagues (and invite others reading this) to share their experiences as they try some of this out.

The workshop will be fairly short, then I’ll answer questions and we’ll socialize for a while. I will share with the bloggers some tips from these earlier posts:

• 8 basic points for basic beginning bloggers
• 7 keys to SEO: How to help people find your blog
• The 5 W’s (and How) of writing for the web
• Strong from the start: advice for writing leads
• How do I monetize my blog?

I also asked people on Twitter to share some tips. (Thanks to all who contributed!)

@stevebuttry schedule your posts, if they are not about news. helps avoiding overload, sometimes…—
  (@sam_piroton) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Update your blog regularly- daily, once a week, etc. People stop checking back if you're inconsistent. #blogtips—
Michelle Mills (@Mickieszoo) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Maintain your own voice. Be conversational. Tons of relevant links don't hurt either. #digitalfirst—
Travis Souders (@TravisSouders) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Simple #blogtips: Update often, always use an image.—
Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Hey! I tell people the same thing: "A picture with every post".—
Perri Collins (@perricollins) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Atypical Tips for Writing Awesome Blog Posts bit.ly/vBTiwd found via @ksablan via @leowid #blogtips—
Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) January 04, 2012

Here’s that link for those blogging tips.

How To Use @Storify's Geo Search Tools To Create A Neighborhood Blog Or Cover A Beat bit.ly/y0gu53 @stevebuttry #blogtips—
Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Super easy #blogtips when short on story ideas: Make a @Storify of your tweets—
Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) January 04, 2012

@stevebuttry Super easy #blogtips when short on story ideas #2: Aggregate area blogs posts (@storify makes it even easier)—
Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) January 04, 2012

Here are the slides for the workshop: