But it’s hard to reconcile its lavish exterior with the fact that so many of the desks in the building’s news room are empty. Due to the hard times that the news industry has recently fallen on, USAT cut 45 newsroom jobs in response to shrinking revenue last fall.

I visited USAT HQ last week along with other members of my graduate program to talk with members of the paper’s interactive program. Despite the news industry’s uncertain outlook, the staffers we spoke with did point to some advantages there were advantages.  One commented:

Newspaper’s multimedia departments are like start-ups. They’ll listen to you even though you’re only 30. There’s less hierarchy.

Email open rates, click-through rates and response rates have fallen from 2006 to 2007. Open rates have fallen from 21.3 percent to 17.6 percent, and click-through rates have dropped from 4.9 percent to 3.8 percent. Email newsletters, with click-through rates averaging 3.6 percent, fell in the middle.

The nonprofits studied sent an average of slightly more than four emails per subscriber per month during both 2006 and 2007.

The annual churn rate, or the rate at which an email list “goes bad” in a year, dropped two percentage points (from 21 percent to 19 percent) between 2006 and 2007, a positive trend.

The total amount raised online increased by 19 percent from 2006 to 2007.

The average advocacy email response rate in 2007 was 7.5 percent. The average fundraising email response rate was 0.13 percent.

While gifts of $1,000 or more made up just 1 percent of overall online donations in 2007, these gifts made up 20 percent of the amount raised online.

A significant portion (almost 60 percent) of the participants’ subscribers did not take any online advocacy actions during 2007.

So-called “super activists,” the subscribers taking six or more online actions in a year, made up just 5 percent of the total email list size but accounted for 42 percent of the organizations’ total actions

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is the fact that it has avoided lapsing into obsolescence in the rapidly changing world of blogs. Despite having been written at a time when blogs were just beginning to surface in public discourse (the book was written in 2002, a year marked by defining blogger moments such as Trent Lott’s resignation from Senate leadership, which some observers have said was at least partly attributed to sustained attention by bloggers to controversial statements that the senator made about Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid in which he ran on an explicitly segregationist platform), the lessons this book offers are still relevant today.

A primary reason why so much of what Blood writes in “The Weblog Handbook” remains useful is her studious resistance to recommending or providing pointers on how to use a specific blogging tool. She makes it clear that aspiring bloggers should focus less on which applications to use and more on understanding blogs’ form and range of expressive content. And she makes this clear early on in the book. “Don’t let anyone confuse you into thinking that specific software is required to [blog],” Blood says. “Weblogging is about personal expression, not about software.” By concentrating on providing recommendations for establishing voice and tone or developing one’s audience, the book ends up being much more than just a run-of-the-mill computer book.

The beginning of “The Weblog Handbook” will be less useful to those who are not entirely uninitiated into the world of blogging. If you are a lapsed blogger (like the author of this post), for instance, who is simply looking for some inspiration to rediscover your blogging mojo, you’re better off skipping the first third of the book. While it provides a comprehensive and informative overview of the birth of the blogosphere in an easy-to-read and discursive style, the section enumerating the reasons why you should blog – their ability to promote self-awareness, enhance one’s critical capacity, etc. – neglects the fact that if you’ve bought the book you’re probably already sold on the idea that blogging is a worthwhile endeavor.

Nevertheless, these passages offer insights that give readers a richer understanding and appreciation of blogging and the broader contexts from which it has emerged, which is precisely what makes Blood’s book so unique.