Twitter for journalists and bloggers

Spotted via Global Voices Online, ReportingOn is a new social network in the style of Twitter for journalists - the definition of which includes bloggers.

Still in a pre-launch phase, ReportingOn has attracted (at time of writing) 355 journalists / bloggers. The idea is that you post 140 character Twitter type messages about whatever it is you are writing about, the idea being that you can make connections with peers who might have information or insights to share.

According to the site:

"If it's a social network, it's one based on beats, which doesn't exist anywhere else just yet.

"There are plenty of blogs, social networks, and discussion boards based on craft, and there's Wired Journalists for general professional networking, but no public place for journalists to flag themselves as, say, an education reporter who frequently writes about standardized testing, and find other reporters working the same beat."

It's a good concept and one that I imagine for now at least would be of particular interest to freelancers and bloggers who don't have the resources of a large newsroom to draw upon.

Interestingly, Global Voices points out that the site has become fairly popular with Latin American journalists with 'Brazil' being one of the top tags at the moment. ReportingOn founder Ryan Sholin says on his web-site:

"The biggest surprise of the first week...is the huge turnout from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking journalists. I’m scrambling to come up with an intelligent way to deal with the different languages on the site without creating too many divisions between users based on their location.

"As a researcher, it’s really exciting to me because it’s what we might call an “unintended use” of the site, and as a developer, it’s exciting to have a sudden need to push something up the feature queue in a hurry."

ReportingOn is funded by the Knight News Challenge.