Dome blog brings immediacy to N&O tradition

At 7:13 a.m. on April 16 last year, The N&O's Ryan Teague Beckwith took our Under the Dome political column back to the future.

At that moment, Beckwith, with 73 years of Dome writers behind him, posted the first item on our new Under the Dome blog.

For the record, it was about state Attorney General Roy Cooper's appearance on CBS' "60 Minutes" to talk about the Duke lacrosse case.

Since then, we've posted almost 4,000 items on the Dome blog, a kind of online notebook that is updated all day.

If you have not read it, you can find it at dome.newsobserver.com.

The Dome blog had its first birthday last week. We celebrated with a cake in the newsroom.

The blog shows how we can build on our best traditions and improve them for a new day.

Under the Dome started in The N&O in 1934. It has changed over the years in length and style.

For decades, it ran on the front page daily. Now it runs in the print N&O Monday through Friday inside City & State.

A long cast of N&O reporters has contributed, including Clifton Daniel, Gene Roberts, Charlie Clay, Roy Parker, Ginny Carroll, A.L. May, Ferrel Guillory, Dan Hoover, Amy Gardner and Rob Christensen.

The print Dome is going strong and remains a must-read for political junkies and state government insiders. But the Internet created new possibilities.

Beckwith and crew

More than a year ago, we decided to create a Dome blog and put Beckwith in charge of it.

He was a natural choice. He had been an N&O reporter for four years and had a passion for online journalism.

Beckwith is the lead writer but he gets feeds from a pack of N&O staffers, as well as our Raleigh-based Charlotte Observer colleagues. For the past few months, he also has been assisted by five students from UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Dome blog has several advantages over its print version, said Bill Krueger, the editor who oversees the blog.

It enables us to post news as it happens. We can include audio and video. We can link to other sites and blogs, serving as your guide to North Carolina politics.

Readers shape news

And we can engage readers in our reporting.

Last year, Beckwith worked a story about legislators' relatives receiving money from a scholarship fund created by lawmakers. He posted his reporting as he went along.

Readers contributed tips, and reporters from other news organizations joined the effort. In the end, they pieced together who received the money. The story unfolded in installments on the blog.

"I can bring people in on the process of reporting," he said. "It feels like a totally new kind of journalism. It's expanded the ability of The N&O to learn things. ... If there is a flaw in the reporting or logic -- or even a simple typo -- by the end of the day, someone has pointed it out to me."

In that way, the blog is a model for what some call "citizen journalism" or "network journalism." We want to do more. We want to tap into what you know.

The Dome blog isn't always serious. Beckwith's chatty writing style and irreverent attitude pervade.

He used the blog to gather information on the origins of the term "catfish amendment," which turned into a story for the print paper. He also used the blog to report the NCAA Men's Final Four picks of the candidates for governor.

We have more than 20 blogs. The Dome blog is among our two most popular; the other is our ACC Now blog. Each consistently gets more than 100,000 page views a month.

Beckwith has posted at all hours, but most of our traffic comes during office hours.

Political junkies used to have to read Dome in the paper every morning. Now they have to check the Dome blog every 15 minutes to see what they might be missing.

Beckwith's goal is for the blog to be a huge drag on productivity across the state. From the looks of our readership numbers, he's succeeding.