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March 28, 2024

Blogs Fuel News Site Growth

Important Details: Blogs seem to have gone from a laughingstock to mainstream in about three years. Now, 13% of the news site traffic of the top 10 news sites, according to a new Nielsen//NetRatings report, comes from blog content. That number is up dramatically from 4% a year ago. Blog traffic is up 210% on those sites overall, year-over-year. Compare that to total audience growth of 9% on those same sites and the impact of blog content becomes clearer.

Who’s reading those blog pages? Men, in great numbers, accounting for two in three blog pages read. That’s a bit more than for the non-blog pages of the same sites, which show 60% male/40% female readership.

In Outsell’s Opinion:  Newspapers have begun to embrace the notion of staff blogging, and their readers like the addition. The reasons vary from the greater currency that blogs enable, the informality they foster (more directly connecting writer and reader) to the simple point of volume. More content from familiar names means more traffic.

Editors have moved beyond decrying pajama-clad bloggers to tackling the tough craft issues involved in blogging within journalistic enterprises. Those issues are numerous: Do staff bloggers get staff time to blog? Do they get extra pay? How much "informal" is allowable and how do reporters find a voice different than their print ones? Who edits this stuff and how rigorously? How do you deal with conflicts of interest, so that the City Hall reporter doesn’t spout off about the mayor’s shortcomings on her blog? The good news is that many newsrooms are figuring it out, step by step, and we see an explosion in content. One good reference point, though aging, is the PressThink’s blog post on top blogging newspapers, published last year. It sets out the best, and the qualities that make them good: currency, quality of writing, voice, reader commenting, and ease of use

To those, Outsell would add several. Blogging emerged as a stepchild of news sites, and too often the blogs are still relegated to a box somewhere on the site, in effect, an island. Even on some of the best sites, including the Houston Chronicle and the St. Petersburg Times, we don’t yet see the integration of blog content with story content. This week, staff blogs about the Bears in Chicago and the Colts in Indianapolis should have those posts show up right by the stories. Ditto on search. Readers want to pick and choose among relevant stories and posts, and sites need to work through their platform issues to make it easy for readers — who will clearly reward them with page views.

In addition, the thrust forward with staff blogs shouldn’t slow the move toward embracing community, user-generated blogging. There’s another whole host of issues and opportunities — see Outsell’s  "Publishers Move to Capture Community-Created Content for Growth"  — in community-generated content. And in its voice, its range and, yes, it’s volume, it’s another sure generator of page views that news sites badly need.