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Are bloggers geeks talking to themselves, a challenge to newspaper columnists, a democratisation of the media or a valuable research tool? They’re all of these, and more

Columnists were finished. Bloggers were going to kill them off. They admitted it themselves: Michael Bywater wrote on his own blog that, “I fill my Column Stomach (it’s a bit like the Pudding Stomach, but requires columnists to fill it) from the blogosphere now. The newspaper, as arbiter and distributor of Column Stomach Food, is no longer of great significance.”

And why should they be? All that’s required of a columnist is the ability to construct a coherent argument and to write entertainingly - and a willing publisher.

Now that anyone can be their own publisher, shouldn’t paid-up commentators have been lined up against the wall, a victim of bloggers’ social-democratic revolution?

It hasn’t quite happened like that. What we have instead is a tentative intercourse between pros and amateurs that affects them both - but not how anyone might have expected.

Though it took a while for newspapers to get a foot in blogging’s door, it seems to have largely paid off. The Times’s Comment Central has just overtaken Guido Fawkes as the most-visited political blog in the UK, and the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CIF) is by far the largest group blog, with around 500 contributors.

There are two major advantages for the papers. The first is that it’s cheap. The Times pays non-staff bloggers per reader comment, while the Guardian pays £75 for direct commissions or posts that make the “Editor’s picks” - the rest are pro bono.

The second, primarily applying to the Guardian, is that they’ve stolen a number of bloggers away from their own sites, and their traffic with them. When the average web user only regularly visits five or six sites, such a protectionist policy is an excellent way of ensuring that their own is one of them.

Far from trying to compete with the mainstream media, plenty of bloggers were eager to obtain that legitimising stamp that writing for a newspaper’s site provides.

But what would this do for the high-power columnists, who have found their privileged position challenged for the first time?

One of the first comments on CIF seemed a reasonable prediction: “Is this the end for columnists? They’ll have to raise their game now that there is a free market.”

And not just a free market, but ordinary readers able to instantly challenge them for the first time: if they have a bad week, they’re going to get hammered for it.

At first, it looked like this would happen. Madeleine Bunting wrote a column on what she had learned from the blog’s readers. But others limited their engagement to telling off posters for being rude, and most refused to comment on - or even read - their own threads at all.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde says of the reader comments, “I just think the blog has encouraged bad manners from various posters buoyed up by anonymity.”

Frank Fisher, aka “MrPikeBishop”, CIF’s most prolific commenter, naturally has an opinion on this:

“It’s fear. Fear certainly explains their reluctance to engage with readers, particularly readers who’d quickly demolish their arguments and poor research. Frequently the response is to hunker down, pull the head inside the shell and refuse to play unless everyone ‘plays nice’.”

Frank also has an prediction of the future of online comment: “Group blogs - blogazines - that feature a number of writers who either come from a similar direction, or want to talk to a similar demographic.”

Group blogs have already played a very different role.

Tim Worstall wrote a post on his blog linking both to something he’d written on the Adam Smith Institute blog and a similar post by Owen Barder, on the dangerous extension of ministerial powers in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Worstall has a particularly influential reader: Times comment editor and columnist Daniel Finkelstein, who hadn’t heard about the Bill before, but covered it in his next column, with the other papers following it up later.

So “user-generated content” works for blogs, too: Finkelstein keeps a close eye on what’s going on on the net. “Some of the people blogging are among the best informed people with specialist interests I share,” he says. “So they help me spot things I might have missed.”

As for Worstall, the blog has worked as “advertising for the brand”(a “froth-at-the-mouth libertarian”) and has resulted in a number of Times comment page commissions as well as book reviews, plus the think-tank blogging. He’s making plenty of extra money as a freelance - just as he set out to do.

“For some, it will replace the two years on f**k all wages that is the current apprenticeship into journalism, either on a local paper or as an unpaid intern on the magazines. Certainly it has for me,” he says.

The majority of blogs are written by amateurs, on whom the best words are those of artist, poet and novelist Joolz Denby: “Amateurism is another way of saying hobby, and hobbies are for people who can’t make the sacrifices.”

But when professionals get involved too, some interesting things happen, and will continue to happen. What they will be in the future, who can tell?

(Feature written for the Online Journalism Course that forms part of the Diploma at Cardiff University. See it in all its linky glory here.)

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