NewAssignment.net creator and journalism prof Jay Rosen’s latest venture just went live: Beatblogging is an attempt to improve the coverage of specific news areas or “beats” by using social-media such as blogs and wikis. In effect, Jay and his team — led by the indefatigable David “DigiDave” Cohn — want to help beat reporters use “crowdsourcing” methods (like Jay’s project with Huffington Post, the political-reporting effort OffTheBus.com) to draw knowledge from various sources.
The list of 13 participants is at Jay’s site, PressThink, and also at the MediaShift Idea Lab site that is part of PBS. It includes Wired digital-music writer Eliot Van Buskirk, a science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, a public-school reporter at the Dallas Morning News, a basketball writer at ESPN.com and a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. The San Jose Mercury News has some thoughts about why it’s taking part.
I think Jay’s idea is brilliant, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. I wish there were some Canadian newspaper reporters taking part.