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A couple of weeks ago Andrew Grant-Adamson, who teaches journalism at the , used his blog "What's the Purpose of Newspaper Blogs?".

Lots of, perhaps even most, print and broadcast news/media organistions have launched blogs. back in August showed that 6 of the top 10 UK daily newspapers had launched journalist blogs and Grant-Adamson's survey of newspaper websites turned up dozens of examples of these:

"The raw figures gathered this afternoon are Times 40, Telegraph 32, Guardian 12, Sun 10, Mail 5, Mirror and Independent none that I could find."

Not stopping there, Grant-Adamson began analysing the number of blogs linking, according to , to The Times and to .

According to , the most linked to blog at The Times is that of religion correspondent who has 772 links from 160 blogs and a technorati rank of 15,049. Second place at the The Times is the blog of columnist who had 162 links from 90 blogs (rank: 28,569), closely followed by The Times with 202 links from 87 blogs and a rank of 29,614.

Over at The Telegraph, Grant-Adamson was way ahead of with 658 links from 160 blogs and a technorati rank of 19,501. Second and third on the Telegraph blogs list, as ranked by technorati, are the blogs of Brussells correspondent , with 321 links from 41 blogs (rank: 76,288) and Beijing correspondent with 49 links from 33 blogs (rank: 96,051).

What does Grant-Adamson say about this?

"A check through the Technorati rankings, unsatisfactory as they are in some ways, seems to confirm the view that some bring little benefit to their papers.

Really? Do the technorati rankings of newspaper blogs really tell the story that Grant-Adamson says, that they bring "little benefit to their papers"?

First of all, I'm not entirely sure that technorati's mechanism for ranking in working properly. It seems to me, , that the rankings are a bit flakey, at least some of the time. [Grant-Adamson himself mentions that rankings did seem to fluctuate whilst he was doing the research]

Secondly, there are lots of other benefits to be brought through newspaper and media organisation blogs:

I'm not saying that links from blogs aren't important - they are increasingly important because of the way that google rank is determined (ever tried typing in?) and also because links FROM bloggers are increasingly driving web traffic - WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says that one-third of the referrals washingtonpost.com gets now (via Jeff Jarvis).

Guardian Unlimited's Head of Editorial Development,, seems to agree with the point that simply counting the numbers may not tell the whole story and posted the to Grant-Adamson:

"...not sure *counting* blogs adds much understanding as to *why* newspapers run blogs, but at Guardian Unlimited we see them as a useful way to have a dialogue with readers, and do things with the way we tell stories that we could not otherwise do. It also gets our journalists used to writing in a different way; blogging is, for me, the first form of journalism born from the web."

Shane Richmond also responded to Grant-Adamson's research, saying that, as AG , the purpose of the Telegraph's blogs is about "filling more niches, unlimited by space, experimentation, interactivity and personality."

Another interesting part of the debate has been that both The Telegraph and Guardian have made some of their usages statistics for blogs known.

Shane Richmond, at The Telegraph, reveals that:

"In September the blogs got page views, almost 12,000 hits per day. We had 34 active bloggers at that time, so that equates to roughly 10,500 hits per blogger. The site isn’t even a year old yet so traffic is at a decent level. Page views have more than doubled in the last six months I’m confident that we will be able double them again in another six months."

As for The Guardian's Comment is Free, Jeff Jarvis is , revealing that, as of the 16th of October, "To date, CiF has played host to 6,000 blog posts and 240,000 responses." The Guardian's reader's editor , stating that Comment is Free had 2.7 million page impressions in June (no doubt it's higher now), equivalent to over one-third of the total PI's on the Guardian Unlimited network of sites.

So where is all this leading me? The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has a lot of blogs that, thus far, have fallen beneath the radar of this debate. As the Senior Producer heading up the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Blogs trial, I couldn't help but start doing my own technorati searches to see how our blogs fare...