By Jim Tankersley
It’s an introspective week for The Swamp. First we rolled out a new look and invited critiques. Now, some university researchers are asking whether we – and newspaper political blogs across the Web – should exist at all.
A study released yesterday by Ball State University concludes, based on viewership habits in the days before the 2006 election, that politics blogs affiliated with newspapers failed to attract the audience or the “conversation” they need to be as effective as non-newspaper political blogs. “While much has been written about blogs’ potential to save democracy and revive journalism,” Professor Lori Demo said in a press release, “this picture of newspapers’ blog posts does little to support that notion.”
“The results of our study call into question whether newspapers are wasting valuable staff resources,” Demo said later in the release. “The time it takes a reporter to post a blog entry that attracts 10 or fewer comments could be time better spent in other areas. Newspapers might consider spending staff time monitoring blogs as sources of news rather than trying to re-create the blogosphere on their Web sites.”
We’ll leave it to you to debate whether The Swamp is doing its part to save democracy. But we’d like to point out some more recent numbers that, er, call into question the results of the study.First, the researchers’ results, per the press release. Demo and colleague Mary Spillman looked at some 360 newspapers and found 42 percent of them produced blogs with “political content.” They studied those blogs for five days leading into the ’06 elections. They found:
*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.
We’ll take them at their word. But we’d humbly suggest that the political blogging world has changed dramatically since the fall of 2006.
The Swamp, for example, has seen its readership double since the beginning of this year. On a good day, we sometimes attract 6.7 comments in the span of a minute or two. We’re not alone. Take a look at the comment numbers on the Washington Post’s “The Fix” or the New York Times’ “The Caucus.”
We are pushing 190,000 comments here in The Swamp since starting a little over two years ago — and we had racked up 150,000 just a couple of months ago.
But hey, we’re always looking for ways to get more folks involved here, to create a better “conversation,” if you will, among our readers. So we’ll put it to you: What can the Swamp do to better engage and inform readers – and, while we’re at it, save democracy?
One thing we promise: We’re not folding our site. Sorry, Ball State.
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