I’m kind of amused at The Age’s attempts to promote their op-ed writers, in particular their political editor and bureau chief, Michelle Grattan. For one thing, she is such a good journalist, and already so highly regarded, that it seems silly. For another, it looks like they can’t quite get it right. The front page pointers for each new article, now with profile pics, are fine; every paper is doing it. But then ten days ago they announced the blog Grattan. I was pleased with the idea of being able subscribe and follow in my feed reader, but so far it turns out it isn’t being used, and most of her articles, understandably, (especially during the election campaign) are leader stories on the front page, and not copied to the blog. The thing that tickled me most, though, was the foray into video commentary, where Grattan gave her usual great analysis, talking directly to the anchor, but without looking at the camera. It looks to me as if The Age is desperate to make her into a brand that can be monetised, and she – and probably we – are really much more interested in what she is actually saying, because its not fluff, it’s worth hearing.

There was a confirmation of this in a more general sense in the ABC Media Report’s radio discussion on blogging the other day. The General Manager of Media at Fairfax Digital, Pippa Leary, said that commercial considerations meant that the blogs that you see coming onto the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age websites are usually those deemed likely to either going to bring in a lot of traffic or a lot of sponsors. They have discovered that blogs not only bring in interaction between journalists and their audience, but also new niche audiences which attract new sponsors:

So think about something like ‘Sam and the City’ — now it’s called ‘Ask Sam’ — it’s the second most popular blog on our site. If you think about what we have in The Sydney Morning Herald print edition, we don’t attract 15- to 18-year-old girls like we attract through ‘Sam and the City’, and for a lot of people that’s a lot of angst, but for us as the commercial division, we now can put Lancome, L’Oreal, a whole lot of different FMCG advertisers we would never have been able to attract before, so we look at blogs as a really great opportunity.

Out of curiosity, I subscribed to Grattan and Ask Sam in Bloglines, and they have 1 and 10 subscribers respectively. The other one I have been subscribed to for a while is Chew on This, which has 8. I interpret that to mean that the general reader doesn’t distinguish between much between blogs and articles, except for being able to comment.