Here are some of the ways you can build a backchannel for your newsroom today, if not necessarily your beat, without ReportingOn:

The Prologue theme for WordPress

If all you need is a way to bring together short updates by a small, set group of people, put up a WordPress blog on your own server with the Prologue theme in place, or use WordPress.com to host it, especially if everyone involved already has an account there.

You’ll get a front pages with recent updates, user pages with their updates, tags to use for something like “beats” or “projects” or “groups” — plus all the usual bells and whistles for WordPress that are available via plugins. Another feature: As with all WordPress blogs, you can always make it private by throwing a password on it, restricting it to internal use.

Verdict: I like it, and I love WordPress, but this really isn’t the way to make new connections, it’s a project management tool to keep track of what everyone in your office or newsroom or virtual office is working on.

Present.ly

First things first, let’s get this out of the way: This is going to cost you money if you’re going to make it useful to a group of more than five people. But it looks like a very well-designed user interface, with features like a mobile site and an API that uses the Twitter API convention out of the box.

This thing is built for enterprise use, inside a company, to be stable and pleasant to work with. That said, again, it costs money. $14/month gets you 15 users, $39 gets you 40, $99 gets 100.

Verdict: Pretty, but probably not worth the money unless you need a mobile version of an internal status-sharing tool tomorrow.

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