Snipers to Microsoft: Beat Bloggers Cover their Turf

By Ryan Pitts
Online Producer
SpokesmanReview.com

Three blocks from the trial over last fall’s D.C. sniper shootings, Kerry Sipe sits at a laptop. He glances at a television monitor, types a few sentences, then saves. More than 300 other journalists are covering the same event, but Sipe’s report just beat them all.

He has the timestamps to prove it.

Sipe is blogging the sniper trial from the media room in the Virginia Beach municipal center, tracking everything from jury instructions and testimony to John Allen Muhammad’s mood. He’s connected to the courtroom through closed-circuit video and the rest of the world through a wireless Internet connection. As soon as he publishes a post, it’s online at his newspaper’s Web site. The judge barred video coverage of the proceedings, so these minute-by-minute updates give readers the closest thing they have to real-time news.

Blogs like Sipe’s echo the online phenomenon of personal publishing, and plenty of media thinkers call them journalism’s Next Big Thing. Readers have become familiar with the format: short, journal-style entries displayed in reverse chronological order. These posts are usually informal in tone, and often include links to other Web sites. But this simplicity, blogging advocates say, brings with it honesty, immediacy and interactivity, ways to help newsrooms expand coverage and re-engage a jaded readership.

Sipe, a Virginian-Pilot online news coordinator, is among a growing number of writers putting these theories into practice. They’re using a new tool to report the news, and whether these blogs chronicle big events or turn into sidebars for a day-to-day beat, they’re certainly giving readers a different perspective.

In some ways, that difference is fundamental: Along with Sipe’s unfiltered copy comes an unfiltered experience. (http://home.hamptonroads.com/guestbook/journal.cfm?id=53)

"Since I'm reporting what's going on now or in the immediate past, I don't have the ability to weigh events and to give more important ones more weight than less important ones,” Sipe said. “Readers are exposed to the mundane and the significant in the same way, just as those who are attending the trial are experiencing them.”

This kind of reporting leaves the burden of assessing the news to readers, a job many say they’d prefer to take on. It also guarantees that drama is never contrived. In one recent post, Sipe recounted the testimony of shooting victim Muhammad Rashid:

After a delay of several minutes, Malvo was brought into the courtroom, flanked by two deputies.

"His face and color and physical description is very much like the man who shot the pistol," Rashid said.

"Do you believe this is the man who shot you?" prosecutor Ebert asked.

"Yes, sir, I do."

Sipe’s blog is just one part of The Virginian-Pilot’s trial coverage; other V-P writers are covering the story in more traditional ways. But as part of that package, the blog’s immediacy is drawing in readers.

"The feedback from the Muhammad trial blog has been tremendous,” Sipe said, citing more than 100 e-mails from readers who say they’re following the story with him online. “Several of them have mentioned that it gives them a sense of being in the courtroom without actually having to devote full-time to the effort.“

A blog’s sense of being there works for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, too. The newspaper’s Web site recently launched a blog to accompany a print series on the crab-fishing industry. Reporter Mike Lewis, the series’ main writer, is now filing online entries from the Bering Sea, aboard the F/V Exito. His posts are first-person confessions of seasickness and camaraderie on 15-foot swells. (http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/crabfishing/)

Lewis describes a crew cook shift turning out breakfast burritos – “The crew appeared to like them for the 45 seconds they lingered to wolf them down” – and later on an ill-fated attempt at hooking crab pots:

“I missed three times at a distance of about 8 feet. I finally got it on the fourth try, but that hardly plugged everyone's laughter. (Note to Alaska Department of Fish and Game: One way to preserve a massive healthy crab population is to mandate that people like me try to catch the damn things.)”

The crab-fishing blog is an informal window into a world of hard work, humor and grim reality. On Tuesday, the P-I printed a story about the death of a deckhand who fell from a nearby ship. It was news that Lewis broke in a blog post on Monday.

Todd Bishop, another P-I writer, isn’t offering exhaustive coverage of a single event or experience; his blog is a daily extension of an important Seattle beat covering software giant Microsoft. (http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/) The business writer believes the print edition and traditional Web site are still the proper places to break news, but now he has space to follow up on print stories with information that doesn’t require a full story. His blog also has become a place to give readers valuable context.

"For example,” he said, “after writing a story about liability for software flaws, I posted an entry that gave readers access to a lot of the material that helped me understand the issue and put the story together.”

Bishop’s posts have helped him collect sources for future stories, people he says he wouldn’t have found without the blog. One reader e-mailed him in response to a post about Microsoft’s software patching strategy; that reader turned out to be the person responsible for patching his own company’s PCs. The next time Bishop covered the issue in print, he contacted his new source for comment.

"As it happened, he wasn't particularly impressed with the news, which helped give the story more balance,” Bishop said.

At the Chicago Tribune, columnist Eric Zorn also relies on his blog’s interactive nature. Zorn has long been a fan of trolling for reader responses; the blog lets him directly solicit e-mail comments, or occasionally toss out a click poll. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ericzorn/chi-zornlog.story) If he feels like his print work has been misunderstood, he tries to clear things up on his blog. And sometimes he finds stories he wasn’t even looking for.

"Just the other day I wrote a little blog item expressing my pique at the onscreen graphics of Fox Sports' baseball broadcasts. The response from blog readers was so unexpectedly strong I decided to do a column on it,” Zorn said.

Like Bishop, he’d rather see breaking news in a more traditional context. But “if I know the competition plans to print the news the next day, I'll blog it.”

Rebecca Nappi of The Spokesman-Review doesn’t expect to lead the news cycle, either -- at least not until the pope dies. Nappi blogs about reform in the Catholic Church. It’s an issue of significance in her community, but one that the Spokane, Washington, paper’s print edition doesn’t always have room for.

As the newspaper’s newest blogger, Nappi says the experience has been an education for her. (http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/journey/) Finding items to blog about -- then doing the research necessary for thoughtful comment -- has broadened her knowledge of an issue on which she already was an expert.

Spokesman-Review health writer Carla Johnson also sees blogging as a way to amplify the paper’s coverage of her beat. (http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/healthbeat/)

"Blog readers learn what I think is the most interesting, useful or weird health story of the day,” Johnson said. “Then they can go read the research themselves on the Web. I'm saying to them, ‘Hey, take a look at this! And if you want more, click here.’

" There's never enough newsprint to adequately cover all the health research and policy questions. The blog gives more to those readers who want more.”

But it’s not just readers who benefit from reporter blogs. At the sniper trial, several journalists have told Sipe they use his online reports to track proceedings and augment their notes. His immediacy has even become somewhat of an inside joke.

On Monday, Sipe said, “during a tense moment just before it was announced that Muhammad would be acting as his own counsel, a reporter from the AP abruptly stood up.

" Another reporter at the back of the room joked, ‘The Virginian-Pilot just reported that the AP is on its feet!"