Comments on: Dan Froomkin: How to better use our biggest assets, beat reporters

By: Beat Blogging! « Reflections on New Media for the Public Interest

Beat Blogging! « Reflections on New Media for the Public Interest — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:03:38 +0000

[...] Froomkin said it best in a piece in Nieman’s Journalism Lab: “A renewed emphasis on beat reporting would be good for our newsgathering efforts overall, [...]

By: instant history

instant history — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:16:51 +0000

Dan Froomkin, then and now: Blog with a voice!…

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet…

By: Rosa

Rosa — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:05:23 +0000

live streams like twitter can be very useful regardless of what some may say: http://www.newsy.com/videos/twee_vee_twitter_gets_down_to_business
With print journalism becoming more and more obsolete it is even more important to stay cutting edge and to understand what readers want, twitter is perfect for that.

By: Terry Steichen

Terry Steichen — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:44:58 +0000

Beat reporters are those that tend to focus strongly on one area, and tend to know that area well. Naturally, everything else being equal, the articles they produce will tend to be more valuable – to those who happen to be interested in that area of news.

But that higher relative value comes at a non-trivial cost – the beat reporter has to be paid even when nothing exciting is breaking on their beat.

To the best of my knowledge, it’s not been convincingly demonstrated that current newspaper woes have been caused by news articles that are low quality (nor will be fixed by quality improvements per se).