Link: Beat Blogging: Wired - The Listening Post.
"WIRED.com first jumped into blogging in a big way two years ago, and since then it has become a cornerstone of our news operation.
"Our principles from the start have been transparency, iterative story telling techniques (write what you know when you know it), and connecting with the readers as a primary source community. The results have been outstanding. Today, an even dozen blogs, covering specific beats from gadgets to music to defense tech, account for more than a quarter of our daily news traffic and 95 percent of the discussions and conversations with readers on our site.
"Unique visitors to WIRED.com have more than tripled in the past year, from about 2 million to nearly 7 million in October, thanks largely to the growth of our blogs.
"The power of beatblogging isn't just a hypothetical. Our Danger Room blog, headed by Noah Shachtman, won an OJA award this year for beat reporting, winning out over metro daily news teams for this honor. So beatblogging is coming into its own, and we've been pioneering those efforts at WIRED.com.
One of the lessons we've learned is that blogging offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering, and with this project we hope to tap even deeper into that phenomenon.
"The beatblogging method has already helped us break news stories that we could not have gotten any other way by letting readers with knowledge find us and inform us. The connections allow us to take even the slenderest threads of information – say an invitation under embargo to meet with technology executives (declined) – to build a complete and accurate news story with the help of our readers.
"This is a proven and tremendously powerful technique, and we're excited at the opportunity to work with Jay and David to improve both our understanding and application of it.
The Wired Team:
(1. Evan Hansen, editor in chief
(2. Lewis Wallace, culture editor
(3. Eliot Van Buskirk, blogger at Wired.com's Listening Post
