New study finds that newspaper blogs fail to increase public dialogue →

Larry Dailey, who was one of my professors, contributed to this. I wonder if newspapers will take heed or continue with business as usual. This goes right along with what I think everyone having to do with blogging saw a few years ago. Newspapers were blogging like mad because they realized it was a market that they were failing to reach. It was never about public participation for them. It was about pageviews and readership overall—ad money at the end of the day. Newspaper bloggers rarely respond. They rarely truly engage. They also probably feel like it’s extra work, for the most part. There is also the issue of blogs being way more democratic. Newspaper blogs are rarely so. They are just news stories written in a slightly different voice and put forth online. It’s still edited. It still has the expert model working well. The link to other blogs is rare. That behavior stifles public participation as much as anything and leads to very ill-informed commenting when it actually does come.