A workshop on the Digital First workflow

I will be leading a workshop on working as a Digital First journalist starting at noon today for colleagues in Connecticut. You are welcome to join on the livestream and ask questions on the live chat.

We’ll address the concerns of the journalists in the conference room and on the live chat. Many of the answers are found in my various blog posts on Digital First journalism:

• How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
• How a Digital First reporter should approach statehouse coverage
• Questions to guide a Digital First reporter’s work on any beat

I will not be using slides on this beat, but if they are helpful to you, here are slides I have used in previous workshops on this topic:

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13 ways a reporter should use a beat blog

A beat blog gives a newsroom a vehicle for providing in-depth coverage that the general-interest approach of a newspaper generally doesn’t allow.

I have decades of memories of arguments with editors (when I was a reporter) and with reporters (when I was an editor) about the reporters’ desire to tell stories in greater depth than the interest level of this mythical “typical” newspaper reader. A newspaper has finite space, and to tell the stories that serve this general-interest need of the masses, its reporters gather far more information that has appeal only in niches of people with keen interest in a particular topic.

Beat blogging is a way to serve that deeper level of interest, to use all the information a reporter gathers. It makes a newsroom’s content more valuable to the community, by serving the broad but shallow general interest and the narrow but deep niche interests.

I’ll be leading a workshop today for Digital First journalists in Connecticut on beat blogging. You can watch the livestream and ask questions on a live chat, starting at 3 p.m. Eastern time. You also can read about how the beat blog fits into the full work of a reporter in my earlier posts that addressed the work of reporters covering courts, sports, statehouses and other beats. Other helpful resources would be the BeatBlogging website (no longer active, but loaded with helpful advice and links), my Introduction to Reporting course for News University and my general blogging advice. I’m sure others have produced many other helpful resources. Please share some of those links in the comments.

I will try to compile a list of good current beat blogs, and I welcome your contributions to that list. Who are good reporters who blog regularly about their beats (don’t hesitate to suggest your own beat or someone on your staff)? But for now, I want to offer some basic advice for beat blogging.

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