Beat reporting has been around pretty much forever. Newspapers do it, TV reporters do it and heck, most bloggers already have a topic of choice. It's time for tv.ku.edu to pump up the jams.
The Lawrence Journal-World (as I noted in my previous post) is one of the most innovative news Web sites out there. I really like how the site has a blog section featuring several blogs, each on a different topic. They are all short and sweet, but interesting and informative at the same time.
We need to drop a funky, fresh beat like my boy MC Hammer, here.I would love to bring this concept to our site. At the beginning of the semester, each 694 student would choose his or her own specific beat. It could be anything- sports, city government, alumni in the news, White Owl watch, whatever. The students would blog about these topics once a week, instead of being assigned a topic, and the blogs would be featured on tv.ku.edu.
Blogging about something you are interested in, and especially something you get to choose, is a lot more fun. Having students choose their own topics will probably result in better content, too, because people tend to try a lot harder when they are doing something they like.
I think this would be a relatively easy thing to pull off. It should be effective as well. The LJ-World blogs are getting comments, which means they're being looked at. People in town are singing along with this tune and tv.ku.edu needs to feel the beat.
This idea was briefly touched on before in a suggestion to link to our ehub blogs. While I don't think that's such a great idea, dedicated blogs for the tv site could do quite well. As you mention, the LJ World and KC Star both have themed blogs for crime, local happenings, etc. My only concern is that with the LJ and Star, their blog authors don't change which results in a reader that identifies on a more personal level with that reporter. Since our staff are constantly changing we'd have a harder time capturing a reader's attention. We might even turn a few readers off if they get used to a certain blogger's style only to find that five months later they've got someone new to contend with.