The BBC Trust’s review of bbc.co.uk carried a set of figures on blogging that were easy to miss. In its section on accountability, the Trust tied the corporation’s commitment “to forge a new relationship with licence fee payers” to the arrival of editors’ and management blogs, which it thought might let the BBC meet that commitment far better in future.
The usage numbers were the striking part. Traffic to the blogs, the Trust noted, had come to outstrip both the BBC’s corporate site and the Have Your Say message boards, while use of Have Your Say itself stayed broadly flat between 2006 and 2007. In 2006-07, by the BBC’s own count, 70 BBC News and BBC Sport editors published 500 posts and drew more than 30,000 reader comments in reply, and management reported 1.5 million user comments and posts a month across bbc.co.uk message boards and blogs together. Audience research for the Trust found the blogs well liked, one respondent describing the editors’ blog as a way for editors to explain their decisions and for viewers to answer back, a continuous dialogue rather than an announcement.
The limit sat on the newsroom side. Both the corporation’s own findings and academic work on the same question concluded that editors, on the whole, treated a blog as another publishing platform rather than as a means of engaging with the people commenting on it.