It's not easy for newspapers to get this blogging thing right, some do and some clearly don't, but the debate about the value of doing it, and how to best go about it, continues... I hope to get back to this issue more in depth soon, but in the meantime, in case you missed these, here's a few essential links:

Neil McIntosh, The Guardian's head of editorial development, looks back at the year for British newspaper blogs and how The Guardian's blogs have fared: Blogging became big for the British media in 2006, only five years after our readers started doing it en masse...

An American perspective, from The American Journalism Review (this seems to be an expanded version of this article, but the link for the latter doesn't work anymore):
... newspapers' current passion for blogging is fueling a vigorous, industry-wide debate about everything from staffing to sourcing, standards to liability. There's an inevitable clash of values between a newspaper, which has a journalistic reputation and brand name to protect, and a swiftly changing medium that has grown in power and prestige precisely because it has flouted many of journalism's traditional rules. Some newsrooms are proceeding quickly but cautiously, calling in lawyers, hammering out guidelines and updating ethics codes to cover the uncharted world of blogging. Others are moving full-speed ahead on the assumption that the blog train left the station long ago and, give or take a few mistakes as the experiment unfolds, it's all going to work out just fine...

And, from Andrew Grant-Adamson, these five useful tests to measure the value of setting up a newspaper blog:
1. Does it do anything which cannot better be done in another section of the site?
2. Does it develop the paper’s interaction with the readers?
3. Does it gain a valuable audience? (A particular niche, readers who are new to the paper etc.)
4. Can you give the blogger sufficient time to blog successfully?
4. Have you chosen a writer or writers who have the aptitude to blog successfully?