The Washington Post added a sponsored blog roll to its site earlier this year. So did the Guardian in the UK. The blogs listed span across a variety of topics and if the Post sells an ad on one of the blogs, it splits the revenue with the bloggers.

"Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.

According to Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, the blog roll and ad network makes business sense, as ad buyers would rather contact the newspaper than deal with a dozen independent blogs. And editorially, these blogs complement coverage that may be lacking in areas such as technology or health.

Although the Post hasn’t – yet – made a significant amount of money from its blog roll, Adify (which supplies the ad network technology) claims the blog roll has increased the site’s audience by more than 50%.

Many other papers are stepping up their blog offerings, such as the Houston Chronicle, which recruited 50 reader-bloggers. The New York Times recently signed on the very successful Freakonomics blog.

Of course, there remain the classic arguments about the potential threats blogs pose to professional journalism.

"There's a lot of uninformed opinion on the Internet and not a lot of solid reporting," said Fred Brown, vice chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee and a columnist at the Denver Post.

In more extreme cases of libel or inaccurate reporting, newspaper websites are generally protected (in the US) from postings by its users.

In the case of USA Today, the paper simply removes "anything brought to our attention that violates our terms of use, including personal attacks, hate speech, obscenities, plagiarism, as well as potentially libelous or defamatory material," Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, wrote in an e-mail.

In the end, newspapers are adopting blogs as a complement to their coverage rather than to replace traditional reporting. Newspapers can gain valuable content at little or no cost with bloggers, and the latter are usually happy to be picked up by mainstream media. A win-win situation?

Source: Los Angeles Times through I Want Media