Are newspapers wasting precious cash employing bloggers? Of some 360 newspapers studied by Ball State University, 42 of which produced blogs, a singular conclusions was drawn: “While much has been written about blogs’ potential to save democracy and revive journalism, this picture of newspapers’ blog posts does little to support that notion.”

That is: Blogs have failed us!

First, the researchers’ results, per the press release. Demo and colleague Mary Spillman looked at some 360 newspapers and found 42 percent of them produced blogs with “political content.” They studied those blogs for five days leading into the ‘06 elections. They found:

*While some blogs contained frequent posts as high as 57 during the five-day study, the average was 8.2, and almost 25 percent had no posts.

*The average number of comments for the five-day period was 33.5, or an average of 6.7 per day, which was skewed by a few bloggers receiving as many as 100 posts daily.

*About 58 percent of people responding to blogs contributed more than one comment.

*Eighty percent of bloggers posted no responses to readers’ comments. [Baltimore Sun]

Then again, this data is from 2006, which might as well be like studying television viewing habits from 1968 (they had TVs then, yes?). So much has changed! Like, everyone is talking on Facebook now, or Digg. And what about all the evidence that shows newspaper blog traffic is growing?

And do we really think the New York Times would’ve employed a full-time blogger, Cityroom’s Sewell Chan, if it didn’t make fiscal sense? Okay, that’s a bad example.