There should be a balance.

Beyond that, I’d say you need to look at the purpose of the blog. For instance, is it news or personal? There are also blogs that offer both.

A news blog should balance gatekeeper and reader interest like a newspaper, whereas a personal blog is more like a column — you can report, opine suggest, etc. using your judgment.

With either type, posts should be relevant to the purpose of the blog. I could write about Britney Spears and probably get more hits, but that’s not the purpose of my blog. My blog is about online journalism, so most of my readers are probably journalists and they expect to read about journalism.

I keep this audience in mind, of course, and try to start a conversation with my posts.

Because mine is a personal blog, I won’t kill an idea solely because I don’t think people will read it. I would kill an idea if I thought it was irrelevant or didn’t contribute to the conversation on a subject — be it starting or continuing.

In response to the last paragraph, I think some people care more than others, for whichever of the reasons — or all — that you state. Everyone has an ego and wants more hits, or else he or she most likely would not be writing a blog.

My purpose in writing this post, and eventually the rest of the series, is to help bloggers (such as students, particularly my class) get more out of their blogs.

The reason I ask is because I find the reality of allowing “numbers of clicks” dictate what bloggers should write too systemic.

Should there be a balance — a trade-off between the writer as gatekeeper and readers as consumers of news?

Wasn’t this how crime wave reporting got started in the first place, by equating majority readership to news relevance?

Are newspapers and bloggers like little children who pride themselves, generally speaking, of having more readers/clicks than the other because that has also been equated to revenues/credibility/popularity?