What is the purpose of newspaper blogs?
Sunday
Oct 22, 2006
For the lack of anything other to do on a wet Sunday afternoon — we were planning on lunch in Southwold but decided it was too cold and windy — I have started compiling the newspaper blog index. So far the data is just the numbers of blogs but I will develop it into a proper index by dividing the salary of the editor by the number of blogs, or something like that when another dull Sunday comes along.
The raw figures gathered this afternoon are Times 40, Telegraph 32, Guardian 12, Sun 10, Mail 5, Mirror and Independent none that I could find. The Independent should get a negative score of putting its site map behind its Portfolio barrier and demanding £1 before I could see it.
One can almost hear some editors shouting: “We need more of these blog things. Everyone has them my daughter tells me.” They have become one of the outward signs that the paper is up with the trends in journalism.
William Rees-Mogg at The Times likes to use questions as his headlines. He explained this on June 7 when he wrote: “I find the value of blogs is that they allow me to ask questions to which I genuinely do not know the answer.” On July 26 his question was: “A hung parliament in 2009?” Sorry, Lord Rees-Mogg even in the blogosphere none of us can help you with that.
Over at the Telegraph (list of 40 blogs) Natasha Cowan, one of four fashion bloggers, writes: “I’m not sure why, but I have got a niggling problem with the way the trend for leggings is being worn at the moment, and after discussing it with others it seems as though I am not the only one.”
More interestingly, at the Sun Louise Compton, the Girl with the Backpack, has discovered biodegradable knickers. I am not sure if this is really a blog as comments don’t seem to be accepted but the idea of reader-directed travel looks interesting.
At the Mail Peter Hitchens seems to take his blogging seriously. But a blog by an opinion columnist always makes you wonder whether you are reading the bits that were not good enough to get into the paper.
The Guardian’s score of 12 is rather misleading as only two of them have an author’s name as the title. They include readers’ reviews in the travelog blog, and the paper’s podcast feed. Jack Schofield has expanded his weekly computer agony column into a blog leaving Roy Greenslade on the media as the paper’s individual blogging voice.
This afternoon of browsing newspaper blogs leaves me confused. Some of the offerings are very good but too many seem like ways of presenting traditional content in a “look we understand the digital age” way, while others are dumping grounds for copy that would never get into the paper.
What would be really fascinating would be to know the numbers of visitors to the 99 blogs from the five newspapers visited.
Comments
Ben King
October 24th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Begs the question - what is the purpose of TV news programmes’ blogs? Are they better or worse?
Neil McIntosh
October 24th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Hello Andrew - not sure *counting* blogs adds much understanding as to *why* newspapers run blogs, but at Guardian Unlimited we see them as a useful way to have a dialogue with readers, and do things with the way we tell stories that we could not otherwise do. It also gets our journalists used to writing in a different way; blogging is, for me, the first form of journalism born from the web.
As for numbers - we have quite a lot of blogs… certainly more than 12. Comment is free is essentially an aggregator for more than 1000 blogs, although only around 700 are active at the moment. We’re about to launch a lot more in a new subject area, although we always favour group blogs over individual blogs. As our rivals’ efforts show, you quickly run into trouble if you insist that all blogs must be written by one individual.
Do get in touch if I can tell you more about what we’re doing, and why.
Ruth Gledhill
November 6th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Again, thank you for all these articles you are doing and have inspired, I think this was the first. ‘What is the purpose of newspaper blogs?’ you ask. Well as befits my job as Times religion correspondent, I don’t see that question as much different to asking what is the purpose of anything. I notice that you wrote this originally on a wet Sunday afternoon when it was too cold to go out for lunch. I am no psychologist, but I can see how on such a grim afternoon in Southwold, life can seem to lack purpose. It can even lack purpose on such afternoons in Kew sometimes. And that, I guess, is the purpose of newspaper blogs. They get us through those rainy afternoons, those meaningless mornings. Whether it is writing them or reading them. You just have to have faith, really, that it is all worthwhile. Now all join in and sing with me: ‘I believe in blog….’ (No I haven’t finally flipped, but it’s the end of a long, long, hard day in Wapping and I am procrastinating writing a fact box for page 3 which I absolutely must get on with now.)
Charles Arthur
November 6th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Personally, I find our blogs are good for putting out stories or snippets that just won’t work in the context of the section I edit and write for (the Guardian’s Technology section).
Not all events that journalists come across merit a big (or even small) piece in the paper, yet they can find a readership - not even necessarily when the piece goes onto the blog; don’t forget the long tail of reading.