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Now I'm blogging as part of the my job

My beat is in a courthouse, a building where human drama plays out in some form every day.  In eight years of covering courts, I'd often hear of interesting stories that wouldn't fit into what I was working on that day, or just didn't have a place for one reason or the other in the paper.

But I've found a home for those stories in the new courts blog the Eagle launched this week.  We call it "What the Judge Ate for Breakfast," after a well-known courthouse saying. It actually as an interesting origin, which we explained in the "about" section. Actually, one of the most difficult parts was researching the origin, which took the help of the University of Kansas Law School Library, to find the exact quote.

Now, I blog as a part of my job.  We also put my Twitter feed in the navigation, so I can continue to file microblogs from the courthouse.  Some of the posts publish to the blog first, and then developed into full stories for the newspaper.  Others update stories that we didn't run in the print edition.  It's a combination of original reporting from our courthouse and links to legal and crime trend stories from elsewhere.

So far, I've gotten good feedback from judges and lawyers.  We'll see if we can get the crime and courts news junkies from the public interested.

Published Saturday, June 14, 2008 12:43 PM by RonSylvester
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Comments

# re: Now I'm blogging as part of the my job

Saturday, June 14, 2008 11:34 AM by Kate Martin
Ron that's great! I loved your tweets during the trial. Great blog title also.

What would you suggest to people who are trying to start a blog for their beats? Some papers are far more wired than others (yours is a great example). For instance, I have a goal of starting a blog before school starts next fall (I'm the ed reporter at my paper).

# re: Now I'm blogging as part of the my job

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 8:38 AM by RonSylvester
Kate:  My suggestion would be to follow the old Nike phrase:  "Just do it."  Really.  Start one and see what happens.

I don't know how valuable my advice is, because we just launched this myself, and while the early reaction has been good it's far from a proven commodity.

But what I've learned in developing this is simply, keep it short and file consistently.  Before you launch it, post until you get into a rhythm at work. You can see I was posting for several months until I got into a good rhythm.  I try to post every day. But at least three times a week.

I also say that I continue to use the theories I learned in the mid 1980s during my short stint at USA TODAY.  The paper was just starting then, and I was impressed by the way they used many different components in their stories, but none repeated any information.  Graphic information wasn't repeated in stories.  Even the cutlines carried new information.

As I've transitioned to online journalism I've tried to keep that in mind.  If I produce a video, I want it to add a new layer to my story, not repeat.

It's the same way with the blog.  I want it to add what I report on in my beat.  Some of the items, I have developed into full stories.  But mostly it's a way to add a new dimension on what I cover for my beat.

Blogging has been valuable in that it forces you to keep engaged in your beat every day.  I'm hoping it will develop into kind of a way to further network with sources.  But we'll see.

Let us know when you launch your education blog.

# Teaching Online Journalism » Reporting beats re-examined

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