Striking up conversations with strangers

The Guardian's director of digital publishing on the challenge posed by weblogs

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday June 22 2005.

In the article below, we spoke of the Guardian's redesign of 1988 taking place at a time when there was no internet. We should have qualified that by adding something like "as a significant factor in publishing". Its origins were some 20 years earlier.

This week it was announced that the Guardian will be changing to its new Berliner format in the autumn. We will have a new size, a new design and a new print plant. It will be one of the most profound changes in our 184-year history.

The world our Berliner will launch into is almost unrecognisable to the one that greeted our last major change - the redesign of 1988. It was a world with only a handful of TV and radio channels, where the only digital device in your home was an LCD watch or a pocket calculator. There were no mobile phones (well none that you could honestly call "mobile"), no Big Brother, and most important of all, no internet.

Of all of these changes, it is the internet that has brought newspapers the greatest threats, opportunities and challenges.

At the very least, it has added new dimensions to the way we publish. In the six years since we launched Guardian Unlimited we have become used to breaking stories through the day, and having an instant, global audience. Through talk boards and email, and the groundbreaking presence of a readers' editor, we have also become used to a much, much greater level of interaction with our readers.

Now, as both a newspaper and a website, we are having to get used to something new: blogging. Blogs that link to us, that talk about us, that criticise us and praise us. Bloggers who have read the Guardian throughout their adult lives, and bloggers who might have stumbled across a single story on Google and decided to love or loathe us as a result.

Depending on which survey you read, there are between 8m and 12m blogs out there, around 4m of which are regularly updated. They come from all continents and from people of all ages.

Some might have huge global audiences, some might be read simply by the author's friends: what matters is that they are read, and are becoming an increasingly important part of people's lives.

As the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, said recently about blogs: "We have to deal with the fact that people aren't just looking to newspapers for information, they are looking to themselves."

Even a self-declared "digital immigrant" such as Rupert Murdoch can see how that is changing people's relationship with their newspaper. "The digital native," he told the American Association of Newspaper Editors, "doesn't send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog."

That is a big issue for the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - more than for any other UK paper. According to analysis by Blogpulse, we are one of the 10 most cited news sources by bloggers around the world. The only other UK player in the list is the BBC, marginally ahead of us.

It is tempting to see the relationship between blogs and traditional media as inherently adversarial. Bloggers rail against traditional media with the cry "factcheck your ass"; professional journalists decry bloggers as amateurs, and in the words of one CBS executive, "guys in pyjamas" (to which bloggers responded by calling themselves the pyjamaheddin).

Yes, if we make a mistake - or if people think we have made a mistake - there are plenty of bloggers watching who can, and will, tell the world. A swarm of angry bloggers is not pleasant to run into; and a swarm of angry, politically motivated bloggers even less so.

But beyond this squaring-up between old and new, something more subtle, sophisticated, and ultimately more profound seems to be happening: our content is spawning a "secondary market" in conversations and connections we have no control over.

People have always talked about newspapers. We would not be doing our job if they didn't. But in the past those conversations were ephemeral and local - they had no life beyond the kitchen table or water-cooler that hosted them.

Now, however, conversations about our content are permanent, and global. An Australian who has never seen a copy of the Guardian can read something we have written and agree or disagree with it on his blog, prompting other bloggers to follow suit. Months after the event, someone from Chile might stumble across it all while searching on Google.

That sort of thing is happening every day. Ironically, as papers sell fewer and fewer copies in the western world, their content has never been so widely read, so talked about, so linked to, and generated so much energy.

On Guardian Unlimited, we are currently looking at a number of ways to harness this energy. It isn't simple. It isn't easy. The challenges are technical and legal as much as anything else. But it is fascinating, and exciting; and like our Berliner, it is the future.

· Simon Waldman is the Guardian's director of digital publishing. Ian Mayes is away.