Newspaper political blogs: Worth it or waste of time?
A study released Wednesday concludes that newspaper’s political blogs are a waste of time. I think they’re wrong.
In 2006, Ball State University and the University of Nevada-Reno looked at 360 newspaper staff-produced blogs the week before the fall elections. Their key findings:
• While some blogs contained frequent posts as high as 57 during the five-day study, the average was 8.2, and almost 25 percent had no posts.
• The average number of comments for the five-day period was 33.5, or an average of 6.7 per day, which was skewed by a few bloggers receiving as many as 100 posts daily.
• About 58 percent of people responding to blogs contributed more than one comment.
• Eighty percent of bloggers posted no responses to readers’ comments.
I’m not sure why this study took nearly two years to complete, but I think — hope — the results would be different today. And I don’t believe the newspaper blogs are a waste of time.
I took at look at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s political blogs from March 27 to April 2 to compare:
| DC Download | Political Fix |
| Nation politics | Missouri and St. Louis politics |
| 13 posts | 30 posts |
| 56 comments | 222 comments |
| 0 responses from bloggers to those who commented | 0 responses from bloggers to those who commented |
| Average of 8 comments per day | Average of 31.7 comments per day |
| Average of 1.9 posts per day | Average of 4 posts per day |
Our bloggers did not post as often as those in the study, but we had a lot of comments. The most-commented post was Piercings “painful” for Rep. Jane Cunningham with 53 comments. Several readers commented more than once — conversations take place between readers in many of the blog comments, but none of our bloggers responded to comments.
The two big lessons that all bloggers can learn:
• Post often, but maintain quality over quantity. Blogging requires a commitment; make it.
• Respond to readers.
- Posted by Erica Smith at 05:32 pm / Permalink for this post
- Filed under: , blogging, politics, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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[...] Smith, a journalist and Web designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote a short response on her blog, Graphic Designr, pointing out a problem in the fact that it took two years to complete [...]
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