Reporter, Reader, Blogger? All of the Above

Imagine a place where bloggers and reporters live in harmony. A place where the ethics and standards of traditional journalism blend with the sheer volume of blogger knowledge, both open to instant feedback from readers. It’s easy if you try.

Or if you are the Austin American-Statesman, one of a growing number of newspapers that are marching boldly into the unknown and opening themselves to their communities. The paper uses Pluck, a blog server, to allow readers to create their own blogs on statesman.com. Online Editor Robert Quigley merges the blogs with coverage of anything relevant in the news that day or prominently features specific blogs on days the bloggers do something particularly good.

"The newspaper business has changed to the point where our mission has changed a bit,” Quigley said. We still provide news and all that, but we are a place for opinions. We’re not just telling people things anymore we’re also listening and incorporating them,” Quigley said.

Although the days of successful print-only newspapers are long gone, the industry should not be ready to hand the reins over to the citizen journalists. The future instead resides in the symbiosis of the two, according to Steve Outing, New Media Expert and former Senior Editor of the Poynter Institute’s Web site. He said he recently attempted to launch a forum dedicated entirely to grassroots media and realized that while the volume of content was there, it was not compelling enough to hold readers without a bit of editing and focus.

With the combination, he said, “you can get something that’s pretty powerful.”

This is what Quigley and the Statesman are succeeding in doing.

When Lady Bird Johnson died in July of 2007, he said there were several reader-bloggers who immediately posted their memories and condolences.

“We pushed their coverage into our coverage,” he said. “It’s a good incentive for them because they are part of the coverage and they get good exposure. One of our bloggers got 5,000 or 6,000 page views that day, which is just a dream for a blogger."

Randall Stephens, a.k.a. spinnerbait, started blogging to promote his new Web site, Adbirds.com. He said the early experimenting of how many page views he could get to his new business, was somewhat fruitful but that the statesman.com transitioned from a business tool into a place to voice his political concerns.

“The blog was kind of designed to test some backward links, but I’m focusing strictly on activism at this point,” he said.

A conservative, he says he does not agree with the politics of the newspaper but recognizes the value in putting his message on its site.

“It’s our premier newspaper locally… As of last night I’d had around 1,500 hits,” he said.

He does, however, wish the site could give him more feedback on exactly who is looking at his blog instead of solely providing page views per month.

Even with all of these mutual benefits for newspapers and bloggers, Outing said there is still a good deal of resistance to allowing citizen journalism on professional news Web sites, coming from the professional journalists who don’t want the less-qualified bloggers being put in the same category they are.

“There’s this funny thing, Angryjournalist.com; it’s basically this open forum where anyone who is a journalist can go in and gripe. A lot of people were dissing the idea of grassroots journalism,” he said.

Don Smith, Interactivity Editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, described a situation where a tech reader-blogger beat the staff computer reporter to a story about Microsoft buying a major gaming company because he was able to use a single anonymous source – a risky move the dependable Seattle P.I. would never allow their reporter to make.

“Those are frustrations that are valid for reporters to be concerned about,” he said.

But at the same time, Smith said, the reader-bloggers can prevent the staff members from doing work they would rather not but that their readers demand.

He said that an entertainment gossip reporter got a massive number of page hits last month but it meant, “We don’t have to write about Lindsay Lohan and the latest episodes with Paris Hilton,” he said. “We get to stick to things of greater news value.

As for the bloggers, the exposure and credibility of being on a newspaper site is great – most of the time.

Eugene Sepulveda, or CommunityMatters3, did not actually know what he was getting into when he set up his Statesman blog.

“I didn’t even know there was a link on the front page of the web site until I got in trouble for the stuff I was blogging,” he said.

He used his blog to vent about the operating procedures of one of the organizations in which he is a member of the board and was surprised when his fellow board members saw it and were unhappy.

“Well I thought about it when I figured it out, whether it was a good or a bad thing, and quickly realized it was probably a good thing,” he said. “And no wonder I was getting as many hits as I did. There was this high visibility benefit to the Statesman blog.”

The mutual benefits experienced by newspapers and bloggers are not without risks. When newspapers open their Web sites to bloggers, there is no telling what these citizen journalists will post under the heading of their reputable organization. Both the Statesman and the Seattle P.I. have come up with quality control measures.

Quigley said that all bloggers are subject to the terms of service of the web site and may be shut down or have a post removed that doesn’t comply. The Seattle P.I. takes this a step further and actually requires readers to apply to become bloggers.

“They have to apply, it has to be arguing for a niche that we want to cover,” he said. “We don’t always limit someone who has a conflict of interest but we require that it be disclosed in the biography… we edit the biographies, we don’t edit what readers put in the blogs themselves.”

Reporters often end up stuck in a strange middle ground between the editors and the bloggers. In addition to sticky situations like scoops on stories, editors often expect reporters to keep blogs of their own. When reporters must adhere to the strictest standards of journalism while keeping up with all of their other responsibilities but produce the volume of citizen bloggers, it can become a heavy burden.

Kate Alexander has been a reporter at the Statesman for six years. Until recently, she covered city hall and has since moved to the state desk. She said the paper launched the city hall blog last fall and charged her and a second reporter with keeping it active.

“My concern when we first started was two-fold. One, I was concerned that we just would not have enough. The way that you make blogs effective is you have sort of this constant activity and people are visiting and commenting… and I was concerned that to have that volume it would be this additional layer of reporting,” she said.

While she still has concerns about keeping enough volume on the blog, she said it has become a great place to flesh out ideas for stories and she believes that it has enhanced her reporting.

“One thing I think that’s been really helpful is you’re able to put up a lot of… our primary reporting materials so people can see. Like a law suit for instance, or a report,” she said.

She also believes that she, along with all blogging reporters, must be able to develop a new voice and style of writing for blogs.

However, as for competition with the reader blogs, she says she is not concerned.

“By and large they are deriving everything they know about what they are writing from us,” she said of local bloggers. “On the city level, the blogs that we’re competing against, I have better sources than they do.”

Smith said this has proven to be true at the Seattle P.I. as well.

“Our reader blogs get a fraction of what our staff blogs do,” he said.

So for Smith and Quigley the benefits of delving into new media have far outweighed the disadvantages. Also for both of them, reader and staff blogs are just a small part the new territory into which they are treading.

“We’re doing a lot of experimentation. We have MySeattle pics where readers can upload their pictures. We have something called SPI that’s run by college students,” he said. “We cover a lot of concerts in town and we cover the big concerts but we don’t really cover the small bands and the small venues… and that’s what SPI is all about.”

Quigley says he knows the Statesman has only scratched the surface of the potential in Journalism 2.0. While the Statesman was Pluck’s first major client, they now host the blogs for several major papers including USA Today, The Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle.
“Soon we are upgrading to the new version (of Pluck),” he said. “It will allow more community going even further into it. There will be automatic commenting on every story. Readers will have avatars and be able to P.M. (personal message) each other.”

“We’re diving further in; we’re not pulling back at all. There’s a long way to go to reach the full potential.”