Getting beyond blogs

[Welcome, trickle of Telegraph readers! You might be interested in my response to the post you've been reading, which explains what's going wrong with the Telegraph's blogs.]

As is the nature of things this time of year I wrote a brief, vaguely predictive piece for the revived Press Gazette (they’re back in print, but have scaled down the web side, alas). Here’s a version for the web.

Happy New Year.

Blogging became big for the British media in 2006, only five years after our readers started doing it en masse. The Times, Telegraph and BBC all launched new collections of blogs, and Guardian Unlimited rolled out Comment is free, Sports blog and others to add to a stable of weblogs first launched in 2001.

The other publishers got at best a mixed bag of results for their blogs. There weren’t many sparks flying when I looked in. On ours, we certainly got sparks, from writers and readers. In contrast to other publishers’ heavily policed environments, we took a risk by encouraging open debate from day one, and have been rewarded with some attention from users.

To lift the lid on stats we normally keep pretty quiet: blog traffic of 1.2m page impressions in December 05 grew to a record 7.1m pages in July 06 as the World Cup and troubles in the Middle East sparked lively discussion across our sites. Despite the huge flows of users, and the inevitable problems a minority of users can bring, the quality of the debate has been strong. Although numbers are rarely made public, I suspect our blogs are second only to the BBC’s in terms of user numbers.

But traffic isn’t the whole story. For all Technorati‘s flaws, I think its measure of inbound links from other blogs is a relevance metric that works; this is what being of the web, not just on it, is all about, because this shows we’re in a conversation, not just shouting. Technorati records more inbound links to Guardian blogs in the last 180 days than to any of our UK rivals – Comment is free, by itself, gets more links from the blogosphere (12,027 at time of posting) than the Times, Telegraph and BBC blogs combined (a total of 11,552 at the time of posting). Our other blogs do even better (17,128 links).

But let’s not get too smug. For all the success we’ve enjoyed, the fact is blogs are the horseless carriages of social media, when fleet-footed rivals are already cranking out Model Ts. Social news sites such as Digg and Newsvine show how users don’t just want to talk about the news – they’d quite like to decide what it is, or add to it because they happen to be experts in the subject at hand.

Myspace and Islandoo, to name but two, prove that vast communities of interest can spring up around mainstream media content. The conversations, properly nurtured, can end up being bigger – in scope and popularity – than the material that sparked them off. These sites might not be true to the blog boosters’ utopian visions of freeing users from the shackles of MSM’s narrow focus, but they are hugely popular. People do still want to talk about quite old-fashioned, mass-market entertainment, turns out.

But what of what we do? All this presents a huge challenge, and opportunity, for journalists. It’s difficult for us to accept we might create sites that are only tangentially about our journalism. It’s even harder to admit that, fanned by the viral winds that sweep the net, those conversations might be much more popular than the other things we produce, and start replacing them. We can mutter about the importance of what we do; of trust, and impartiality, and double sourcing and accountability. But the audience’s attention is already drifting. Our readers’ conversations don’t – op-ed columnists beware – even need our initial spark to set the chat off, although if we do well we can still provide it.

On the plus side, our blog efforts – which will look primitive in only a year or two – prove there’s a benefit to media organisations in bringing our readers together. They’re not always talking about our journalism, but often they are, and often they wouldn’t be around if we hadn’t erected the tent and said something interesting to kick things off. There’s something that’s worked, then, and something that can be built on in 2007. Cling to that thought and you’ll be fine.