Beat Blogging

In today's technologically advanced world, it seems that just about anyone can become a journalist. While blogs and sites such as Twitter pose a threat to traditional journalist styles, these can also be helpful to today's journalists.

Blogs and online news sites have become the main way people are getting their news nowadays. Journalists are now taking advantage of these things to help better their own stories and how they get their news. Many news sites lately I have noticed have taken blogs into consideration when publishing stories. Stories will focus on subjects that people have been blogging about.

At a lecture by Katherine Fong "Do innovations like beat blogging & citizen journalism improve inclusion?" she talked about the Mercury News' attempt to have beat blogging. Fong talked about the blog Green Tech Beat where people could join and talk about green initiatives. While she said that the blog had not been all that successful because of the lack of time the author had to put into it, the blog was going in the right direction. One aspect of the blog that was helpful was to the author was that members had to answer questions such as occuption and why they were interested in a blog about green technology. This helped the blog's author, Matt Nauman find people to connect with when he needed help on certain topics.

Beat Blogging has helped news sites and news blogs alike. Input from readers and viewers can help enhance stories to give a first person perspective. For example on community specific blogs such as Jack and Jill people can help by giving their input on their opinions on the inauguration day ceremonies or by thier own experience if they were there. The same applies to big newspapers such as The New York Times. People can help add to stories by sharing what they felt being at the ceremonies.