One of my favorite spots on washingtonpost.com is the blog directory. There you’ll find the cob webs of the paper’s site—-all kinds of niche blogs, stale blogs, and this blog: “Friday Follies: Totally random polls.”

Well, the Post is now thinking that its 90-odd blogs are just too much for one newspaper Web site.

Good thinkin’!

Check out the memo, post-jump.

Colleagues,

Please find a link to an updated and complete list of blogs on washingtonpost.com: http://blog.washingtonpost.com.

It is the first step in what has been an ongoing, comprehensive review of all our blogs. You will notice that we have now classified 32 blogs as archived. Dozens of other blogs that were dormant have been spiked. This still leaves us about 90 “active” blogs for now.

While we will continue to regularly add new blogs that are topical and relevant to our ‘For and About Washington’ strategy, we plan to ask editors, especially our Innovation Editors, to take a closer look over the next month or so at all active blogs, using current traffic, audience participation and page view trends as key measures. And here is why:

Typically, 10 blogs on washingtonpost.com account for about 60% of all our blog page views in any given week. The top 20 blogs account for 79% of all weekly blog page views. There is usually very little change in which blogs make our top 20 list.

The next 30 blogs collectively add 18% more blog page views. This means that 50 of our blogs generate 97.3% of all our blog page views. The remaining 40 or so blogs generally contribute about 2.7% of blog page views while taking up significant time and resources both from reporters and editors.

Obviously, we want to be sure that we are nurturing new blogs or blogs that are highly topical/seasonal, and those that significantly complement our overall coverage on a given topic. We also want to support those blogs that are showing consistent upward momentum with readers even if their current page view base is small. But, at the same time, we want to make sure that we are not diverting limited resources—reporting, editing, tools, marketing—away from our better performing blogs.

Most editors in the newsroom have by now received training on pulling traffic data on blogs, so please ask your editor if you want specific trend information on your blog. Feel free to drop Sandy Sugawara on the Universal News Desk or me a note if you have more questions.

Thank you,
Raju [Narisetti]