Joining the Conversation   

Newspapers are establishing blogs to talk to readers about their concerns.

Shortly after Raleigh's News & Observer ran the front-page headline "Trooper had sex in patrol car" last September, readers started complaining. Some felt the language was unnecessary; one mother said she had to place a sticker over the offending word to hide it from her young daughter. John Drescher, then managing editor of the North Carolina daily, wanted to explain the headline choice, which accompanied a story about a judge who reinstated a state trooper after ruling that other troopers had committed similar transgressions but were allowed to keep their jobs.

Instead of writing a column for the print edition, Drescher took to the paper's Web site, newsobserver.com, where he posted a detailed entry on The Editors' Blog.

Addressing both specifics of the story and general journalistic responsibility, Drescher wrote that while the secondary headline more accurately summarized the article, a good lead headline must be direct and engaging. "The headline needed to have the words 'trooper' and 'sex' in it," he wrote. "Those are the key elements of the story. Anything else is writing around the central facts of the story."

Once more likely to circle the wagons than engage in conversation, newspapers have moved in recent years to become more transparent, and top editors like Drescher are increasingly reaching out to readers via blogs. Not only do the blogs provide a direct link to readers and a venue for shedding light on behind-the-scenes newsroom decisions, they also offer a level of immediacy and personal contact that print columns do not. "It was the perfect forum for something like that, where readers want an explanation now," says Drescher, currently the N&O's executive editor. "In my view, that was probably the best use of the blog in recent months."

Such blogs and forums have mushroomed on newspaper Web sites across the country, from the Idaho Statesman's Ask the Editors to the New York Times' Talk to the Newsroom. On November 27, the Los Angeles Times launched the ambitious Readers' Representative Journal, an initiative aimed at educating the public and interacting with those who want to know more about how the editorial process works.

The blog on latimes.com showcases the paper's ethics guidelines, offers grammar critiques of Times stories, provides updates on previous articles with a feature called "Whatever happened to..?" and gives people a chance to interact with reporters as well as editors. In the "Ask a Staffer" section, readers posed questions to photographer Karen

Tapia-Andersen after she took a shockingly close-up picture of firefighters in danger during the California wildfires.

Jamie Gold, the Times' readers' representative, says the blog was created after she realized that many readers didn't know the paper had ethics guidelines and weren't aware of how much newsroom discussion was devoted to making sure stories are fair. In the past, questions from readers were generally handled internally by the readers' representative's office, but Gold says she wanted to make such conversations more public.

"Readers feel really separate from the press, and it's become an 'us versus them' thing," says Gold, who runs the blog with assistant readers' representative Kent Zelas. "It has been going on for decades, but it has gotten worse."

Some editors say they are surprised by the range of questions they get on the blogs. Jack Robinson, managing editor of the Fresno Bee, contributes to the paper's Ask the Editors blog, which launched in November 2006 on fresnobee.com. He says he gets questions about why certain stories wind up on the front page, but he also once dealt with a "small rebellion" from readers who were unhappy with the design of the paper's new television guide.

Many aspects of newsroom operations taken for granted by journalists are puzzling to readers, Gold says. Robinson says people sometimes promulgate conspiracy theories as to why a story is played a certain way because they don't understand the way the paper works. "We all make that mistake by overestimating what readers know," he says. "We want people to understand the newspaper and [to] help demystify the process."

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, offers readers a smorgasbord of interactive blogs on spokesman review.com. Editorial writers post on A Matter of Opinion; Managing Editor Gary Graham works on News Diary; photographers discuss images on Finding the Frame; Daily Briefing recaps news meetings; and Editor Steven A. Smith talks to his public at News is a Conversation, where he tries to post at least two or three times a day. The paper also offers Webcasts of its news meetings, which are open to the public.

Smith, whose posts have on occasion attracted nearly 50 responses, says the Spokesman-Review editors are determined not to be "passive" bloggers. "I will say pretty opinionated things, and I will not step back from an argument over a journalistic decision if readers are challenging it," he says.

Traffic and reader participation vary from paper to paper. At the News & Observer, The Editors' Blog gets between 5,000 and 7,500 page views a month, according to newsobserver.com Managing Editor Eric Frederick, which puts it in the middle of the pack among the paper's 27 blogs. But when controversy flared last year over the Duke lacrosse story (see "Justice Delayed," August/September), the blog was one of the busiest places on the site, says Executive Editor Drescher.

Vickie Kilgore, executive editor at the Olympian, a 32,000-circulation paper in Olympia, Washington, says that while some posts on Ask the Editors on theolympian.com attract a lot of interest, she does not receive as many inquiries from readers as she would like. The Bee's Robinson also says he wishes he received more questions. "I don't know that people care that much, but the people who do care, care passionately," he says. "This is a cheap and easy way to stay ahead of the curve and to try to address reader concerns quickly and openly, so it doesn't bother me terribly that it doesn't get a lot of traffic."

The blogs are not without downsides. Most readers are civil, editors say, but on occasion the comments turn nasty and unduly personal. And some worry that with everything out in the open, the intense scrutiny could create a climate, as one editor puts it, of "self-flagellation."

But the positives seem to outweigh the negatives. And the L.A. Times' Gold thinks the online initiatives can also make print products stronger. If the paper's new Readers' Representative Journal heightens newsroom awareness about how routine journalism practices can elude readers, reporters might start spelling them out in their copy. "We shouldn't have to put this stuff in a separate journal," Gold says. "It should be part of the story."

And while the editor blogs may not be for everyone, they do seem to resonate with many readers. "I don't think everyone wants to know why and how, but a lot of people do," says Karen Hunter, reader representative at the Hartford Courant, who has had a blog for about two years on courant.com. "You would think that people would just say, 'That's a dumb headline,' and move on, but quite a few people like to interact with the newsroom."

Emily Yahr

Yahr (eyahr@umd.edu) wrote about political fact-checking sites in AJR's December/ January issue.