Digital Beat Reporting

While we're on the subject of lessons learned from the Argo Project... here's a link to last week's webinar about how stations used blogs focused on specific topics to build audience, credibility and impact in their communities and beyond. (NPRStations.org requires password access)

We’ve been assembling a large cache of resources about digital beat reporting and its progenitor, the Argo Project.

Fans of NPR's Matt Thompson (and who isn't a fan?) consider this presentation to be one of his best, which is a high bar.

Marinate, for a moment, in the glorious ugliness of the Huffington Post. I’d say that HuffPo’s been more successful than any other news site before it in adapting the sensibility of the tabloid newspaper to the Web. Drudge led the way here, but HuffPo has nearly perfected its imitation of the irresistible pull of those sensational supermarket scandal rags, screaming at you with their blaring, saucy headlines, daring you not to look.

This isn’t controversial anymore. We know that a strong community is a huge asset for any site. And as I mentioned previously, the Argo-blogger’s use of her crowd is going to be an essential component of her site’s success. But if we accept that comments are content (or more accurately, that community is content), what does that actually imply?

Answer: It implies we treat comments as content. And what are some of the things we do for content?

Content gets assigned.