Could not agree more with your post. Could you or the bloggers you cover address what this type of community building and commenting means for a blog’s metrics. Specifically, what is the average time spent on these news blogs by users who are allowed and encouraged to comment? And why can’t the industry shift from a pageview-centric approach to one where the “stickiness” of the reader is a valuable commodity that ad sales teams can sell against?

I think if you look at most newspaper sites, you’ll find that people might click on news stories a ton but spend a lot less time with them than in areas of a website where they can leave comments, i.e. chat rooms, discussion forums.

To me, the future of newspaper websites and the industry as a whole is taking that conversation — where it’s now typically in a “ghetto” on most news websites — and bringing it front and center to the entire online news experience. Just my 2 cents.

James

But how did the ghetto form? I think it’s because they’ve been neglected in the manner you’re fighting against.

By hiring a community manager (or whatever you want to call it), and encouraging reporters to respond to user comments, newspapers can take back these ghettos and turn them into productive neighborhoods.

I see far too many newspapers leaning on technology for a solution to getting rid of errant comments when the solution is simply a real voice. If we reach out to users, and teach them how we expect them to interact with the site, we can improve the quality of content overall.

As Patrick ably notes, it’s also critical to community building.

When we talk about driving comments, we have to look at individual blogs.

Some blogs and posts will get a lot of traffic but not a lot of comments. Others are a bit flipped like yours.

Let’s say you didn’t allow people to comment on your blog. What do you think would happen to your page views? I guarantee it would go down noticeably.

That’s what I mean by driving traffic. Allowing comments will give an individual blog more traffic. It doesn’t mean that a lot of comments will translate into a ton of page views, but it does mean that a blog is getting more page views than it otherwise would have.

Also, comments help bolster another important Web metric — time spent on a Web site. Do you have access to that information? Many people (advertisers) feel time spent is more important than raw page views, and comments are a great way to encourage people to spend more time per browsing session on your blog.

Do they? That’s a statement that should be supported by some research. Hey, I’m a big fan of interacting with readers via comments — Pat cites me as a “what’s right” example in this post, in fact — but …

My blog gets about 15,000 page views a week and draws on average 175 comments. But there are blogs at my organization with much bigger page view numbers that don’t get nearly as many comments. And there are a few that get more comments than I do with smaller page views.

What a good, vibrant comment section does is build your recurring reader base. Folks interested in your topic will come back if they know there’s a decent discussion going on there. Is that “driving traffic?” Yes, in a sense. But it’s not a given that active comments will result in oodles of page views.