As I get back into blogging, I am slowly going through my favourites blogs to find out what I have been missing. Kristine Lowe pointed me to a recent and interesting post by Adam Tinworth on why media gets community wrong. He writes:

You either care about your readers, or you don’t. Creating forums, and then making that your only point of community interaction with your readers is roughly like inviting some guests round - and then not letting them out of the guest bedroom. It shows that you’ve heard of the idea of hospitality, but aren’t really all that keen on the idea of, y’know, socialising.

Things happen but it is difficult to see how the Telegraph came to post a blog story on the levels of postal voting in the Ealing Southall by-election the day before polling.

As any journalist who has spent a few hours panic revising before a law exam knows electoral law is tough on publishing voting information  before the poll closes. No wonder Inspector Plod is visiting the Victoria newsroom.

It is not as though the author of the post on the Little and Large blog was a youngster on work experience. The author, Jonathan Isaby has "has worked around Westminster for eight years. He is deputy editor of the Spy column and has a talent for mimicry".

His post was pulled but a screen grab, with some figures obscured, is at Political Penguin.

This incident suggests the normal editorial controls, which save us from out most of our mistakes when working for newspapers, were not in place. Of course, one of the advantages of blogging is that it allows quicker publication but that has dangers.

The individual blogger has no such journalistic process and we take the risk ourselves. When a blog is part of a newspaper site it is different: the editor has responsibility. This is an issue which needs much more attention as blogs are being increasingly seen as a way of by-passing normal editorial mediation to get stories to the readers more quickly.

More like a suicide note than a newspaper. My first reaction to the redesigned Independent on Sunday was so adverse, I sought a Second Opinion before writing more. If anything, it was more critical than the initial impression. "I thought the front was an ad wrap-around but it is the front," said SO.

"A very different reading experience from the traditional Sunday paper," according to the page two introduction to the redesign. Later we are  told: "The IoS has the news values of a traditional Sunday paper, but the production values of a weekly magazines."

Well, the production values are more like those of a not very good freesheet where the ad department rules the roost and editorial struggles to fill the remaining space with anything that will fit the gaps.

SO: "I’ve got the page 20 and I haven’t seen anything I want to read."

The overall impression is grey, dull, retro,  a design time left behind with some touches that are meant to show that the Sindy understands the new world of journalism. Supernibs, 75 word stories, have symbols suggesting websites to visit, further reading or an indication that there is more on the papers website.

What is good is that the external links have been added to stories on the website as well, but not all the printed stories with links are on the website.

The paper seems to behaving like a a news aggregation site, without considering whether people want to spend Sunday morning with the paper next to their computer.

Another "we are modern touch" are the numerous infographics. All rather dull with two colours at most, they seem to be there because the editor has said "we must have graphics", rather than someone deciding the graphic will improve the way the story is told.

So what about the second part of the redesign, the new colour mag? Is it any better than the newspaper? "They have this brilliant new columnist who tells us why she loves Marks and Spencer. God help us!" SO responds.

Last week Tristan Davies, the Sindy editor told the Guardian the revamp would appeal to people who do not want "page after page of news". He added:

It’s not about dumbing down, we want to have more readers of every type. There’s no repositioning. People who are not buying papers are the ones we need to reach.

Let’s hope they are there and he can reach them, but don’t put your money on it. That brings me to the New Independent on Sunday blog. Comments on the new design are 16 to 1 against.

Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian new readers’ editor (ombudsman) is to start a blog about issues for the paper and its readers, she tells us in Comment is free. This is great and should open up a conversation with readers which, at times, will undoubtedly be difficult.

That is probably why she carefully describes it as an "experiment" that will appear on Thursdays. Clearly she needs to think about what she writes but I wonder whether a fixed weekly date is sustainable in new media.

My Telegraph has gone live this week and it is looking like one of the most interesting ideas around in developing newspaper communities. Registered readers have their own blog, a personal page for saving articles and collating comments, and an easier way of posting comments on Telegraph blogs.

Shane Richmond, the communities editor, is promising more features are on their way. There is more information at the about My Telegraph page.

Winning the Webby award for the best newspaper website for the third consecutive year is a great achievement for Guardian Unlimited. The others on the shortlist were the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

The New York Times won the Webby for the best business blog with its Deal Book, a large-scale group blog. Both the Guardian (Comment is Free) and the NYTimes (The Caucus) were nominated for best political blog but the award went to Truthdig.

Later: I missed out the fact that the Guardian was also nominated in the podcast category which went to National Public Radio.

Coverage of events like the Virginia Tech shootings, the London transport bombings and hurricane Katrina would not be complete without a rush to predict the end of news as we know.

Robin Hamman at his Cybersoc blog put it like this yesterday:

The past few days have pointed to a future where audiences are likely to look first to blogs and other forms of participatory media for first hand accounts of emerging stories before turning to the mainstream media. Of course mainstream media will still have a role to play - confirming those stories, providing thoroughly researched facts, and gathering comment from credible sources.

Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, did not switch on his TV until the evening on the day of the shootings in Blacksburg. Instead he “used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.”

He points out that the “citizen media” component is not new and writes of the home movie footage of the shooting of President Kennedy which became an essential part of the historical record. He continues:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Gillmor says, “We will still need journalists to help sort things out” and concludes:

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Giving everyone with an internet connection access to much of the raw material of news is new and changes things. It opens up traditional journalism to more, valuable scrutiny and challenge.

But I find it difficult to believe that the mass of people will turn first to blogs, YouTube and Flickr as first sources of news. This takes me back to Pew Research’s latest report on what What Americans Know (figures below are taken from the questionnaire) released this week.

One of the options in the question about sources of news, was “Read online blogs where people discuss events in the news”. The figure asnwering “yes” was 11%. Only listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show scored lower(8%). By contrast 55% read a daily newspaper, 46% watched nightly network news and 39% CNN.

I doubt very much whether people en masse will ever choose to go to unmediated material as their first source of news. It is simply too time consuming and too difficult to make sense of it.

The work of journalists covering any big story is essentially to find, aggregate and select. It is work that requires a team of people, reporters, photographers, news editors, copy tasters… It is not just the reporters on the ground but those in the office who hit the phones trying to find eye witnesses, experts, officials, friends, relatives and anyone else who might contribute to the story.

Added to that mix we now have blogs, YouTube and flickr which produce dramatic stories and pictures. They help to build up the overall picture. Unlike the traditional reporter’s interviews everyone has direct access to the material.

Mainstream media’s websites are also soliciting videos, stills and personal experiences of major events. This “participatory media” is certainly changing the way journalists go about assembling the story.

But that does not mean it is going to take over. Journalists have always had to try to make sense out of the noise of conflicting information, multitudes of sources and confusion. Now there are more sources and that makes the job tougher yet.

It was hard enough when the volume of material was restricted by the capacity of the teleprinter feeds. Then electronic transmission to desktop computers increased the volume and now the internet produces even more material to be read.

Dan Gillmor as a journalist, has the experience to sift information and make judgments on credibility and reliability: most people do not. Neither do they have the time.

It’s not a blogwar, but more a blog skirmish as the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond sallies forth from Victoria to harry the Guardian in its Clerkenwell redoubt. Not surprisingly the Telegraph has taken exception to Peter Wilby’s robust criticism in Media Guardian on Monday which detected a “whiff of Kulturkamf” .

Richmond’s return of fire is concentrated on one of Wilby’s minor points, where he claimed the Telegraph defied the first rule of blogging: “Do it often and build up a following.” The lack of activity from the crime and religion correspondents was cited.

In return, Ricmond writes:

Every so often someone from the Guardian explains how Comment is Free knocks other newspaper blogs into a cocked hat, which conveniently ignores the fact that Comment is Free is not a blog….

Why isn’t it a blog? First of all because a substantial number of the posts that appear there are simply articles from the newspaper with comment boxes stuck on the bottom….

Trying to define blogs is not a simple matter but I do have some sympathy with Richmond. When I questioned the purpose of newspaper blogs back in October I found the Guardian’s offerings were very different and wrote:

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.

I have not checked recently on how things may have changed but at the time Neil McIntosh, Guardian Unlimited’s head of editorial development, responded that they prefered group blogs.

The argument about what is a blog will roll on. But one that is not updated regularly does not deserve the name.

On this point, I reported on January 28 that the Independent had removed the link to its blogs. It is back but the latest post on any of its blogs remains the one that starts: “Just a quick note to let you know that a round up of Christmas gigs… is now available on the main site.”

That is definitely a dead blog.

Later: McIntosh has responded to Richmond saying in effect, who cares what you call it so long as it works for the readers.

Guido Fawkes the blogger who dishes the dirt on politicians has reacted strongly to a post on the blog of Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, today. Fawkes, who is also known as Paul Staines, says legal letters went out at 12.30pm and suggests the post by Watson has been removed.

4pm The remainder of this post (mine) has been removed. I had been looking at Watson’s blog earlier and jumped to an assumption about the post that Staines was complaining about. Watson mentioned Staines in two posts today. One post has been replaced while the other other remains as written.

6pm A post relating to Staines has also been temporarily removed at Pickled Politics for legal reasons. Author Sunny Hundal promises: “This ain’t over yet.”

What is there to be said about my inclusion in Graham Holliday’s Who’s on your blogroll? feature in the current Press Gazette except that I am flattered? The list below comes from the blog of Martin Stabe who would have obviously been in the list if he had not just returned to the Press Gazette where he worked until its change of ownership a couple of months ago.

The spread includes profiles of Greenslade by Roy Greenslade, Wordblog by Andrew Grant-Adamson, Adrian Monck, Cybersoc by Robin Hamman, Sacred Facts by Richard Sambrook, Online Journalism Blog by Paul Bradshaw, Virtual Economics by Seamus McCauley, Shane Richmond, Complete Tosh by Neil McIntosh, Andy Dickinson, Richard Burton, Strange Attractor by Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson — and the anonymous Vickywatch.