In March of 2006, in a major talk called “Newspapers in the Age of Blogs,” Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger committed the nearly 200-year-old paper to a transition to digital forms. Among the Guardian’s innovations was the launch just that month of “Comment is free” [Cif], an interactive news and opinion site that remains in service today. Cif’s contributors include writers outside the ordinary circle of Guardian staff, and each writer’s works appear not only on the Cif site but also on a personal page. “They’ve all got their own homepage,” said Rusbridger, “so we’ve [essentially] given each of them a blog.”
Guardian readers, too, can end up with something like a blog. After registering in order to participate in the comment thread beneath most of the paper’s articles, a reader comes into possession of a homepage that gathers all of his or her comments in reverse chronological order, just like a blog. Live links lead back to the articles where the comments first appeared. A profile of the reader-turned-writer tops the sidebar as well.
This blog-like page isn’t as attractive as the contributor’s version, but it’s not bad. If the Guardian wanted to pay a compliment to some or all of its readers-who-comment, a few small changes might make a difference.
- Make the page a little nicer to look at. For one thing, remove the too-often-repeated blue cartoon speech balloon. Import an avatar from the article or section of the paper where the comment originated, for example. Encourage a person to link back to his or her profile page on a regular basis.
- Real bloggers need and use permalinks, and the Guardian comments have them, leading back to the article where the comment first appeared. To make the profile page more like a blog, though, create a permalink leading to the comment itself as a single freestanding entry on the profile page. Then people could link to Jane or John’s work in exactly the way that active bloggers do.
- Most daring, perhaps not legally safe to do: after a trial period or with approval, allow the writer to post directly to this profile page. Then it would really be a Guardian blog.
It would ordinarily be a point of pride for a writer to send readers to an attractively presented collection of his or her thoughtful Guardian comments.