Pilot's blogs a hit with thousands of viewers

The Virginian-Pilot has quietly passed a milestone. With the introduction of its first blogs during mid-May 2006, this newspaper assumed a parallel identity in cyberspace. It’s one that in many ways exists — indeed perhaps thrives — on defying the rules of journalism practiced for more than a century on its pages.

That first experiment in interactive journalism featured four Pilot staffers who developed online personas . Among them, Malcolm Venable began delivering his musings on pop culture, and Kerry Dougherty presented the irreverent brand of conservatism familiar to readers of her column.

The capacity of blogs to invite reader interaction and track reader preferences endows them with features that have no parallel to the ink-on-paper news model. In the blogosphere, where popularity is measured in “views” or “hits,” Venable and Dougherty rank among The Pilot’s Top Ten. Venable has scored 9,421 hits since the beginning of the year and Dougherty, 12,144.

Since their introduction, the number of Pilot blogs has grown to 30, most of them the undertaking of individual staffers. In addition, HamptonRoads.com, the entertainment counterpart to Pilotonline’s news focus, established a Web page for bloggers in the region. Those 48 community blogs serve up conversations on a variety of niche interests, many with self-explanatory labels such as “Go Navy Wife,” and “Movie Addict.”

What makes this growth of Pilot-linked blogs all the more remarkable is that it developed at a time when circulation numbers declined. In the same two-year period beginning May 14, 2006, circulation dropped by 8.6 percent. But, as Editor Denis Finley notes, “Blogs have not exactly buried us.” In-house marketing stats indicate the paper is still seen by more than a half-million readers a week.

While the immense popularity many of these online diarists have achieved provides a glimpse of journalism’s future contours, echoes of the past are discernible as well. The most successful in the Pilot line-up is “bletters,” Pilotonline’s letters to the editor blog. It scores more than seven times the number of page views of our second-most popular blog.

Even on this digital frontier, bedrock journalism traditions retain their standing. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating to explore how the Internet permits a double standard, one that defies all the constants of Journalism 101.

While news delivered in column inches on paper is inclined to be serious, blogs are impertinent or playful. A newspaper’s time-honored charter is objectivity; successful blogs require opinions, often the stronger the better. A newspaper’s tone is aloof and impersonal. A blog invites conversation .

Some of the most successful blogs seem to thrive on a combination of sass and edginess. Venable, for example, welcomes the opportunity to present his “original point of view,” and likes the idea that the inflexible standards of print can be bent in cyberspace to meet, for example, reader demands for gossip.

Because they often reach special interest audiences, blogs can go beyond the fare that editors feel comfortable presenting to a mass audience in the daily paper. Venable’s blog features the much talked-about image taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, who, but for a sheet, appears nude. That image appeared a few weeks after the newspaper declined to run a photo of the much-talked about — and far less suggestive — nude self-portrait by a 17-year-old artist from Churchland High School .

Kyle Tucker, whose blog about Virginia Tech football has a huge following — 14,325 hits since Jan. 1 — can, in a breach of journalistic conventions, affectionately address readers as “Birdbrains” or “Hokieheads” and characterize his musings as “simpleton observations.”

Newsroom staffer Diana D’Abruzzo chronicled a four-month exercise in self-restraint. Chagrined with her weekly $110 grocery bills, even in the face of an overstocked pantry and freezer, D’Abruzzo resolved to cut her spending and empty her larder. After announcing that intention in print in mid-January, D’Abruzzo retreated to the blogosphere where, in the ensuing 16 weeks, 12,805 viewers offered her advice, recipes and empathy. She is mystified by the response to “The cupboard is bare.” Maybe it’s because “a lot of people live similar, overstuffed lives,” D’Abruzzo conjectured. Or perhaps readers were amused by her “wacky meals.”

Editorial Page Editor Dennis Hartig is no less perplexed by the extraordinary popularity of “bletters.” It had 108,367 hits this year . Hartig thinks those people who call up the site each week, an average of 6,000 views, reflect a continuing public engagement with dogged journalism. That traffic, he said, “tells me that we should not be too quick to abandon what has always worked, good old-fashioned hard news about our world, our country and our community.”

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com