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Help a reporter out

Peter Shankman launched something really, really interesting to me today at HelpAReporter.com.

The premise: He works in PR and has a list of reliable and credible sources a mile long; his reporter friends are constantly asking him who they should call about [your story topic here].

Check it out, sign up, and maybe you can help a reporter out. Or maybe you’re looking for a certain sort of source. Let Peter know what you’re looking for, and maybe he knows someone who can help.

I’m totally engrossed by this for reasons obvious to anyone who has been following my work (more talk than anything else so far – I promise April and May will involve actual code, announcements, etc.) on ReportingOn.

Any way to use social networking (it’s made of people, eh?) to connect reporters with better sources is something worth tracking.

(Of course, I heard about this on Twitter. Follow me, follow ReportingOn, and follow Peter.)

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10 blogs your newspaper needs to rip off

I’m making a short list of frequently updated news blogs published by mainstream news organizations that post breaking news and link out to other sources.

If you run a newspaper.com and you don’t have a blog like this to put together links and short updates, ask yourself why not.

These are all great examples of blogs that get news up in a timely way without a great deal of waiting around for a daily-print-cycle-based editorial process to wrap up.

  1. The Lede – New York Times – Notes on the news in the Times and all over the place. Links to blogs, other news sources, YouTube videos embedded on the page, etc. See also: City Room for the local NYC version.
  2. Blotter – ABC News – “Brian Ross and the Investigative Team” provide lots of detail on current news stories. Not much in the way of links, but there’s lots more here than you’d find on the nightly newscast.
  3. On Deadline – USA Today – Breaking news, including frequent updates on whatever’s breaking right now this minute, plus links to outside sources.
  4. The Trail – Washington Post – Campaign trail notes from WaPo staffers. Less links and more reporting, but short and sweet for the most part, far ahead of the print cycle.
  5. Wonkette – Gawker Media – Washington DC gossip + snark.
  6. Instapundit – Glenn Reynolds – A classic example of a political blog, but the links are the content here.
  7. Romenesko – Poynter – I’d guess this is the single most widely-read blog in U.S. newsrooms. All the news industry news you can shake a browser at, all links, all the time.
  8. Epicenter – Wired – Lots of technology business news here, often in the form of short posts with links to other news sources, blogs, and research.
  9. L.A. Now – L.A. Times – Daily links, photos, and bits of news.
  10. TechBlog – Houston Chronicle – OK, so this is more topical than timely, but Dwight Silverman is probably the most prolific individual newspaper blogger out there, with really frequent updates and lots of links, focusing on consumer technology, not venture capital news that no one outside of Silicon Valley cares much about.

Feel free to add more examples in the comments.

I’m looking for the best news linkblogs out there to use as examples of what a newspaper.com should be doing with an all-purpose breaking news blog or a topical linkblog.

See also: Scott Karp on “link journalism.”