Your Guide to Virginia Tech Beat Writer Blogs

Since most of my content is stolen from linked to these guys, I figured I'd show them a little love. There are five Hokies beat writers whose blogs I have loaded into the ol' RSS reader. They make life easy and keep my football appetite quenched. Some of them have embraced the blogging concept as a way to reach out to hardcore football fans while others are just now grasping the concept.

Kyle Tucker (Norfolk Virginian-Pilot)
KT was probably the first Hokie beat writer to "get" this blogging thing. At first he was using it mainly to transcribe his quotes from practice (which probably served the dual purpose of being able to copy and paste them into a story). But as the year went on, he's added a lot more notes to the quotes and most of his posts are long and full of great stuff. What I like about it is he puts a lot of his own opinions into his posts, stuff he can't really do when writing a straight news story or feature.

Darryl Slater (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
Slater is giving Kyle Tucker a run for his money for best mainstream media Hokies blog. He's posting every day and putting up photos and video. I like the blog because the commenting feature is easy to use and the entire post shows up in my RSS reader without me having to click through to the RTD's Web site. With the others, only a sentence or two comes up. However, Slater has to deal with the very ugly and awkward format the RTD has for its blogs. Substance is much better than style with this one.

Nathan Warters (Lynchburg News and Advance)
Nathan "Tommie Frazier" Warters has come through with some great blog posts since practice started. He has a lot of notes and quotes from players and coaches and doesn't just replicate his story for the next day's newspaper. He's right up there with Kyle Tucker for amount of content (and good content at that) put into each blog post.

Norm Wood (Newport News Daily Press)
Wood covers both the Hokies and Hoos for his blog at the Daily Press. So far it looks like he'll be posting notes from practice as well as short articles of note, like the one on Jaymes Brooks' thoughts on Alabama's Terrence Cody. Some of the formatting is a little weird and sometimes it shows up jumbled on Google Reader. However, Wood appears to be putting more effort into his blog this year.

Randy King (Roanoke Times)
King is the longest tenured beat writer among the current group. He shares his blog with Wahoo beat writer Doug Doughty and uses his space to post news and notes that don't warrant a full story. It doesn't look like he'll be updating it very day, but that could change.