I’ve been argu­ing for some time that jour­nal­ists need to embrace the best ele­ments of social media — going beyond the new media and mul­ti­me­dia ele­ments of the craft devel­oped over the past 15 years to develop a true con­ver­sa­tion about the news with mem­bers of their communities.

In the past few weeks I’ve begun ply­ing the waters to see who’s begun to take advan­tage of the new social tools now avail­able to all of us, in prepa­ra­tion for an online course I’ll be giv­ing, along with Paul Gillin and Michele McLel­lan, at the Poyn­ter Institute’s News U. start­ing next month about how news orga­ni­za­tions can incor­po­rate social media in their news offer­ings. (The lessons are equally applic­a­ble to cor­po­ra­tions, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, non­prof­its and other institutions.)

Here’s the first of four seg­ments in the series: a 23-minute audio pod­cast with Chicago Tri­bune gen­eral assign­ment reporter James Janega about his use of social media tools, par­tic­u­larly Twit­ter, in his report­ing for the paper.

Stream or down­load the inter­view (time: 23:28):

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Lots of great obser­va­tions and money quotes dur­ing the interview:

• Janega has Twit­ter on most of the day in the back­ground, the way you might have AM radio on or the way cop reporters used to lis­ten to police band radio.

• Dur­ing Hur­ri­ance Gus­tav, at a reader’s sug­ges­tion, Janega cre­ated Gus­tav reporter as an infor­ma­tion source on Twitter.

• His twit­ter­ing is a bit of a bal­anc­ing act between the per­sonal and the pro­fes­sional, “and I think I’m begin­ning to hit on a bal­ance that I like,” he said. His tweets con­sist of shar­ing per­sonal remarks, mak­ing jour­nal­is­tic obser­va­tions and offer­ing point­ers to Tri­bune reports, such as when he live-blogged the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings against then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

• The paper holds reg­u­lar Tri­bune twee­t­ups to stay in touch with the com­mu­nity and to attach a face to a Twit­ter ID.

• “I don’t want to be a robot. The Chicago Tri­bune can really be the impe­r­ial storm troop­ers of the news world in the Midwest.”

• Janega dis­cusses the Advanced Search fea­ture on Twit­ter, which lets you search for all tweets within a geo­graphic range — say, within 15 miles of Chicago.

• He uses Twit­ter and Face­book to con­tact peo­ple for sto­ries. Of social net­works, he says, “It’s the phone book for peo­ple under 35.”

• “Your respon­si­bil­i­ties as a sto­ry­teller don’t end with just tel­ing the story. You have to deliver it to your audience.

• Janega says that reporters develop a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter sep­a­rate from the newspaper’s. “It’s like a gar­den that you tend.”

• “There are a lot of voices on Twit­ter, but you bring exper­tise as a jour­nal­ist,” adding back­ground and putting events in con­text beyond the nar­ra­tive of the day, and ver­i­fy­ing information.

We need more many more James Jane­gas at news­pa­pers around the country.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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