More papers should publish bloggers' critiques

From Jon Garfunkel on December 1, 2005 at 12:40 AM

Well, it's not really worth writing on my own website a response.

"Feedback in the Internet era no longer comes exclusively through letters to the editor. People more often respond through their own blogs and websites."

Not quite. A year ago, the Times explained that they get nearly a thousand letters a day. How many blog posts? Well, we can use Technorati and enter stuff like "www.nytimes.com/2005/11" which gets us ~8,000 for November, ~300 for October, 69 for September, 26 for August and for July, 16 for June... wait a minute. It's showing ~800 for 11/30. I wish I could pay money for Technorati's searches to work consistently.

Suppose we use that 800 number for responses to yesterday's paper.
But how many of these are actual responses? Versus just bookmarking? Maybe 1 out of 10.

The Washington Post links to Technorati-linked posts, by the way. And any letter to a newspaper on article X should appear a link away from that article. What's good for the bloggers should also work for readers who have the courtesy to write a letter.

But there real question: Suppose that the 1m subscribers yields 1,000 responses per day. Is 1/1000 a good measure? Someone who's actually in J-school-- I'm just a poser-- can figure that out.

So, of the 100 or so U.S. dailies with circulation over 100K, we suppose they get a hundred letters a day. Yes, these would be spread across the different articles. And we may even find that certain articles attract most of the attention. There *is* a practical limit to the length of any discussion (number of letters) on any given thread, but there's been very little publicized research on this.

Direct comments on a story almost always outweigh the number of blog responses. On the other hand, the most cogent responses will likely end up on a website somewhere (or another publication). These should of course be linked as well. Not sure if every xJR nitpick needs to be pointed to. But consider also a piece like Michael Massing's 8,000-word critique of Judith Miller and other pre-war reporting back in February 2004. To this day, it hasn't been acknowledged by the Times.

This is long enough now I *could* put it on Civilities... and fill in the links.

From Robert Niles on December 1, 2005 at 4:45 PM

But Technorati indexes just a fraction of sites on the Internet. Laying aside the very valid concerns about Technorati's reliability, one needs to also consider non-blog websites, e-mail newsletters and discussion forums. There's an immense about of feedback there. Eventually, a smart newspaper would devote resources to monitoring those. But the blogs are a more convenient place to start.

We also should not forget that there is a generational difference among readers more likely to write than to web publish a response, as well.

This would be an interesting topic to get some hard numbers on from a variety of papers, rather than just speculating with "back of the envelope" figuring. I'm game to publish such a piece if someone wants to pursue those figures.

(And let's not forget that the NYT has shoved its most provocative content behind a paid wall, dramatically slashing the number of inbound blogosphere links.)

From Jon Garfunkel on December 2, 2005 at 7:19 AM

Robert, I absolutely agree that more research is necessary. The round numbers I threw out were just starting points. Recall that I approach this field as an engineer-- that understanding the models of the current system is integral to making proposals for evolving it.

I'll write out a loger response this weekend.