AMERICAN journalists have recently launched a project called “beatblogging.” It involves at least 13 media organizations covering different beats, like science, technology, gaming and music, among others. This experiment involves reporters building their own “social networks” around their beats. It will use blogs as means to create this network.

David Cohn of Wired’s Listening Post and a participant in this project, writes:

This experiment is taking place in 13 news rooms across the country. Each will be tackling the project from a different angle and as a result, the will come across unique obstacles.

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FITTINGLY enough, newspaper and media publishing association Ifra covered Digital Trend Day in Amsterdam via a nifty multiblog. Ifra held the event in cooperation with INMA.

Check out videos and downloads from the event.

WOULDN’T it be ironic if the alternative media represented by blogging/citizen journalism would just end up replicating some of the shortcomings of mainstream media?

This was the warning sounded by the editor of the BBC College of Journalism while talking about political journalism and blogging.

Here’s an excerpt from the Journalism.co.uk entry:

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REMEMBER the days when news websites relied on tomorrow’s paper for stories? Today, the roles have been reversed with online counterparts providing more content to newspapers. Recently American newspaper BostonNow has decided to publish blogs submitted to its website. The idea is not new. Still, it is a noteworthy effort that hopes to “connect the community to the readers.”

Excerpt:

While most newspapers are trying to stake bigger claims online, one new publication is pulling material off the Internet to be printed in ink.

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SEE what happens when someone ghost writes your blog entries for you?

CBS anchor Katie Couric is reportedly shocked by an entry that appeared on the Katie Couric’s Notebook portion of the official Couric & Co. blog on CBS. Couric has admitted that she does not pen some of the entries on her blog.

In this case, the blog entry, a video and text essay, was reportedly penned by one of the producers, who has been fired after it turned out that the blog post plagiarized a Jeffrey Zaslow column piece on The Wall Street Journal.

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HERE’S a provoking question posed by an article on Guardian Unlimited.

This question is a result of an observation Robert Niles, the editor of the Online Journalism Review, which found that journalists often see bloggers “feeding” off the work of newspapers and magazines since they just serve as a “global echo chamber.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Are bloggers parasites? That’s the question of the day in the navel-gazing world of the blogosphere. Robert Niles, the editor of the Online Journalism Review, recently decried what he sees as a tendency by journalists to characterise blogs as “a ‘parasitic’ medium” that feeds off the work of traditional newspapers and magazines. He calls the charge “a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work.”

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THANKS to Jim Caro of Blogbastic! for blogging about the soft launch of the INQUIRER.net Blogs service.

Here’s an excerpt from Jim’s post:

In the Philippines, the Philippine Daily Inquirer recently had a soft launch of its blogsite with Joey Alarilla trying the waters. So here’s one media outfit trying to test the untried waters of newspaper blogging in the Philippine scene. One Philippine Media institution which first tried blogging was the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, which has its own institutional blog. Its pool of writers also blog personally along with other journalists all over the country.

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