Now to the meat of the matter.

I can easily back up my view on the failure of the staff blog effort if interactivity is a significant goal. (If interactivity is NOT a significant goal then it’s just publishing as usual only a little shorter with different deadlines, right?)

I did a quick tally of the number of comments on your site today — you have 4,300 (and change) comments. And those include comments over several days AND that number is skewed upwards by nearly 900 comments on the Guardian redesign (surely a special circumstance that inspires passions.) So the current per-day comment volume is south of 4,300 (by the way, I did this late in the day your time to ensure people had a chance to weigh in.)

You don’t mention what time period the 160,000 comments you cite took place in — but let’s be generous and assume it was a month.

Let’s further assume that every single one of them was posted by a unique person (which we know is not the case, but let’s give this the best possible odds.).

At first blush and without context, 160,000 seems like a pretty wonderful number. But we’re all newspeople here and we like context. And reality.

As of September the Guardian had 10 million monthly unique readers by its own count. And 100 million page views. Probably more now, but let’s skew this in favor of success and use the old numbers.

So under the best possible case scenario — and one that is unrealistically generous — the Guardian succeeds in inspiring a paltry 1.6 percent of its readers to comment over the course of an entire month! And the real world performance is much lower, as we both know. (It was under one percent when I looked last fall.)

Put it another way, no matter how many times you try to get them to comment in a month, 98.4% of your readers say “no thanks, mate.”

Consider the page views. Over the course of the month, you have 100 million opportunities to stimulate readers to comment. Of those entreaties a mere 0.16 percent of your pages deliver a response. Again, best case.

Or over the course of a whole month, 99.84% percent of the time people reading your pages do not find something moving enough to comment.

If measuring response in fractions of percentage points is successful interactivity, how low do you have to go before you consider it failure?

Try it another way. Here’s a comparitive figure: After I tallied your comments today, I looked at the front page of http://www.digg.com.

A mere six (!!) stories delivered more comments than several days on the Guardian, one of the world’s leading news sites.

All of the stories on http://www.digg.com front page (JUST the front page) deliver more than twice as many comments as several days on, yes one of the worlds top news sites.

Again, if this isn’t a picture of failure for staff blog interactivity, what is?

The Guardian is a global brand, a national treasure and much larger than http://www.digg.com (although digg is growing fast). But digg.com wipes the floor with the Guardian when it comes to interactivity. Could it be that, maybe I’m right when I say newspaper readers are not imporessed with the existing bland approaches to interactivity?

Put it another way — on any given day wwww.digg.com will have more comments than a full month on the guardian. In 12 days, it will have more comments than a year on the Guardian.

Call it rot all you like. Anyone can see the numbers.

How much evidence must one deliver before we say, “hey this isn’t working out as we hoped, let’s try something different?”

The problem isn’t the Guardian’s *approach* per se. The problem is staff blogs themselves. They are not exciting and don’t really change the playing field. Newspapers need to do much more to convince our audience that we want to listen.

The vast, vast majority of staff-blogs are self-delusional vanity projects, I think.

I use the Guardian because it certainly IS the absolute best case scenario in this space. And even in the best case, staff-blogs still fail if interactivity is the goal.

There are better ways to do this — the folks at the Guardian are smart and creative, reach for something more. Set the bar high.

For the record, my criticism is specific to the staff blogs. I think most of what the Guardian does sets the benchmark for excellence in this industry. I’ve said as much many times.

In this specific case, though, it’s failing and badly. Unless, of course we consider success to be a single comment and wild success anything over 1 percent response rate.

Staff blogs are goofy and wrongheaded. Invite your public to participate through other less traditional ways. Invite your newsroom to new practices through more daring means, too.

The problem then will be in newspaper management. It will take a savvy editor who’s willing to stick his/her neck out and hire the blogger/journalist. But, I have faith that there are some smart–and forward looking–cookies out there who will see the advantage of a blogger/journalist and hire that rare bird.

Blogs can be done quite well by traditional media houses, but it takes someone who knows the blog topography and the medium well enough to lead the effort. This is because you do require a fine balance of staying within limits set by the traditional media processes and valuing the independence and critical thinking ability that most bloggers value more than anything else. Instances of plagiarism will be there, it is there in traditional media, so blogging, with lesser safeguards will not be exempt from it, you just need proper way to deals to with it.

When we started out, we had a list of guidelines for our bloggers. Initially, they were ignored all over the place and there were problems, but that was also because most traditional print/television journalists are just not used what the concept actually means. But we took a calculated risk and let things run without too much intervention and I am glad to say that things have found a balance/acceptable level of its own. There still are problems, but overall, things have only improved.

In short, his assertions about the Guardian’s blogs are made without any understanding of the Guardian’s aims in this project, any knowledge of the total number of comments we take every day, or any clue about our blogs’ total traffic.

Thus, Bob simply doesn’t have the knowledge to be able to brand our blogs a failure with regard to interactivity.

Any particularly effort-rich form of interactivity (blog comments fit this bill) is going to be a minority sport against total user numbers, but there’s minority sports, and then there are minority sports. We’ve seen more than 160,000 comments to our ten or so subject-specific blogs (which no, have not taken “substantial” resources to do) and, so far, 25,000 comments to our new Comment is free blog project, which launched last month.

Despite what Bob implies, our commitment to interactivity has never wavered, even when our readers are rude about us, or other people. Yes, there’s plenty we’re learning from them, but to follow Bob’s advice would lead us to not bother trying.

If this is failure, I hope Bob continues to brand us one for many years to come. But I do wish he’d just talk to us about what we’re doing – we might not agree, but at least he could base his critiques on facts.

Neil McIntosh
neil.mcintosh@guardian.co.uk

We do have a few readers who blog on our site, with varying degrees of interest and followings.

Bob, I’ll take your challenge. When a calamitous DWI fatality occured last summer, we channeled huge public outcry on our forums into a separate forum for reccomendations and proposals, which caught the atention of the DWI planning Council, a town hall meeting was created, and those public responses eventually had some impact and shape at the state level. We engaged the public to that level, starting from reader comments on a news story.

Where I see most attempts at blogs or interactivy in MSM failing is that for all the talk of participatory journalism, newspapers wont participate. WAPO lost in the ombudsman affair in my view because they werent reactive or listening to the public enough to moderate and sufficiently engage the public dialogue till it weas far too late. Opening up readers to comment and then abandoning them isnt participatory, its passive.

I’m writing a series on how it is being done well –New Media: MSM Tool to Close the Gap and the second part to that, Talk Back Newspapers as a series looking at the Santa Fe New Mexican for a macro view of the issue. I’ll be adding one, two or three more posts on it.

There has to be a real listening component.

Hattie @ MotherPie

The Post was incredibly dense in hiring Domenech, not just because they didn’t vet him adequately but because he was hired primarily as a provacateur rather than a writer or thinker; plenty of skilled writers and thinkers are also provocative, and there was no reason to skimp on the latter two qualities in favor of the former, particularly since, for good or ill, just about any opinionated blogger will provoke a good chunk of the readership at most newspapers.

So, what does “doing blogs right” entail? Unless they’re doing straight-up reporting, bloggers ought to abide by the same editorial standards as a paper’s editorial columnists, which tend toward the liberal. When Daniel Okrent was the public editor at the Times, he told me the only restrictions on editorial columnists were that they couldn’t swear and they couldn’t libel anyone. Since then, the paper instituted an unevenly enforced policy requiring corrections of factual errors.

That last should be a breeze for the Post, given their ombudsman’s “you should have known what we meant” standard.

Everyone at a paper is, or should be, subject to the death penalty for plagiarism.

The two examples cited here really have nothing to do with blogging other than that they involved bloggers. Plagiarism isn’t a blogger-specific problem, and even Hiltzik’s behavior has a precedent with John Lott/Mary Rosh, and probably others who haven’t made as much of a splash.

This isn’t that complicated. I really don’t understand why people insist on screwing it up.