Pharmalot and the beatblogging experiment

I had breakfast earlier this week with Ed Silverman, maestro of our pharmaceutical industry site Pharmalot, and we spent a good chunk of our time talking about his participation in Jay Rosen’s beatblogging project, which is now starting to gain some momentum with the 13 participating newsrooms from across the country.

The idea behind the project, as originally explained by Jay at PressThink, is this:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

We buy that idea, and the question now is how to make it happen. Saying you want to build a social network around a beat is one thing. Building it is another.

So I’m hoping for a little help here. What makes the most sense? I can see several ways to go, but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about these and others:

Wide open: Jump into Facebook, invite industry experts to join, then accept every friend invitation that comes in and feed the best stuff into the blog and a Pharmalot group on Facebook. Or set up a Politweets for pharma news and let the twittering begin. (I suspect Ryan Sholin will come up with some cool ideas on this front as part of his ReportingOn project.)

Open, but filtered: Use FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse to gather stuff from designated contributors, as Matt Marshall described in a recent post, then display the results on the site and let anyone subscribe to the feed.

Closed but open: This could involve something like a mini-Reddit that allows a select group of knowledgeable people who work in and around the industry to recommend stories that might otherwise not get the attention they deserve. As Dave Winer noted recently, small groups of people can offer a lot of value this way. The results of the group’s recommendations would be displayed on the site.

Closed: Employees of the pharmaceutical industry, like many industries out there, are not always free to speak publicly about the inner workings of their companies. This is the least satisfying of the approaches, for my money, but you could set up, say, an invitation-only forum where members remain anonymous to everyone but the beat reporter. The point being that they might feel free to share things they otherwise wouldn’t.

There’s been a lot of good talk about this at beatblogging.org, where David Cohn is doing yeoman’s work to move this project along. But if you have ideas, please share ‘em.