2. Now moving specifically to blogs. Blog readership, according to survey data, seems to have stalled in 2005. Content analysis also shows there is little of what we most would think of as original reporting in blogs. Yet they often write about events outside the purview of the mainstream press. How ultimately do you think blogs and other citizen media will affect news reporting in America? Will we ever see them as a more significant, or even equally important part of the mainstream American news diet as traditional journalism?

Robert Cox (complete version): I do not accept the premise of the question. I believe that blog readership has increased dramatically each year and continues to grow. I would be interested to learn the basis for his premise.

I do not believe there are any good measures of blog readership. The only numbers out there come from the log files of the bloggers themselves and are easily manipulated. If there is a common standard out there among bloggers it is Sitemeter, an imperfect tool for measuring readership for many reasons. There are many flaws with what pass for measures of readership but the most obvious one is the reliance on measuring so-called “unique visitors” and the active “comments section” on certain blogs. If a “unique visit” is defined as a person connecting to a web server then leaving that web server for some discreet period such as 30 minutes then a reader who return who comes to a site throughout the day to engage in a dialog on a particular comment might be counted as five readers not one. I do recall one analysis of Daily Kos that concluded that the unique visitor total for the site – 300,000 on the day of the analysis – was based on just 65,000 actual readers being counted, on average, 5 times. There are many other problems – RSS feeds cause an undercount for web analytics tools like Sitemeter, hot linking of audio, video and especially digital images, causes significant over counting, visits from splogs, comment/trackback spammers count as visits and so result in over counting. There are also software tools out there for those who want to cheat and artificially inflate their numbers.

That said, if you look at Sitemeter and assume for argument’s sake that it is accurate, then you would see a decline in 2005 and that might lead you to conclude, erroneously, that blog readership is “stalled”. Since, as noted above, there are no actual figures, my guess is as good as any and I would guess that the actual number of readers of blogs is up dramatically but that it is masked for several reasons. First, most active blogs cover politics (all of the seven blogs you chose for your study) and as 2004 was a presidential election year it should be no surprise that there was a spike in blog traffic between the Conventions and the Election and that in the six months after the election these blogs saw a commensurate drop in readership (as much as 50% or more). Second, going into 2004 few news organizations or larger commercial sites had their own blogs something that began to change in 2004. Since then many of the most widely read blogs are now contained within sites run by news organizations and they do not break out their traffic numbers or report their traffic to sites like the Truth Laid Bare Ecosystem. Third, the widespread adoption of RSS among blog readers, the integration of RSS readers into the latest browsers from Apple and Mozilla and the promotion of blog RSS feeds by major internet companies like Yahoo! has meant that an increasing number of blog readers need never visit the site (and so are not counted as “unique visitors” by tools like SiteMeter). There are others but these three should be sufficient to make the point that commonly cited measures of blog readership are wildly inaccurate and do not take into account recent developments in blogging which suggest anecdotally that blog readership has been growing very rapidly since 2000 when I read my first blog.