The rise of the web and the popularity of blogs and other citizen media is a challenge for traditional media owners. Newspapers and magazines are torn between wanting to compete directly, and wanting to stick to their guns and do what they do best. The rules of the game have changed.

The Guardian has responded better than most. It’s a small newspaper in Britain with a circulation of about 380,000 per day, but it’s a massive player online with about 15 million unique users per month globally. It’s embraced blogging, reader interaction, podcasts and the rest.

Yet The Guardian, like everyone else, is still figuring out how far to go down this road. This was highlighted last week by the sad case of Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old who is about to set off on a backpacking trip to India and Thailand. Max was commissioned to write a series of weekly posts from the road, and the first one, introducing the trip and chronicling his visa application, went up last Thursday. I saw this at the time, since I subscribe to Travelog, but it’s the breathtaking scale of the backlash - including spoof sites, countless blog posts, and even a mention in the Wikipedia entry for “nepotism” - over the past three days that makes this really notable.

The problem was that the idea - middle class kid spends his gap year partying in India and Thailand - is not terribly original and Max’s writing, while not as terrible as some commenters made it out to be, does nothing to rise above the basic dullness of the concept. He writes:

“I’m kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It’s India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers.”

The response from Guardian Unlimited readers was scathing, complaining about the clichéd idea and quality of the writing, and suggesting that he must have got the job through nepotism, or as a promotion for Skins, which he occasionally writes for. Someone did a Google search on his name and figured out that he is related to Paul Gogarty, an occasional freelance contributor to The Guardian’s travel section. By the time I looked at the thread most of the most insulting comments had been removed, so I didn’t see the worst of it, though it’s still pretty bad. Rafael Behr has written about it for Comment is Free, likening the “pillorying” of Max both on the Guardian comments threads and in the wider blogosphere to a scene from the Cultural Revolution in China and complaining that there is only mob rule online. However, a good proportion of the comments were directed at Andy Pietrasik, the travel editor.

Pietrasik responded the following day, answering some of the criticisms and inaccuracies but stopping short of admitting he was wrong to commission it. He quite rightly points out that no one deserves the level of abuse that Max has got, “no matter how skinny their jeans”. He also said:

“One thing that came out of yesterday’s posts was that you want to hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, so I’m going to be putting up a lot more readers’ recommendations and writing. I hope you like it. I’m sure you’ll let me know.”

This is what is puzzling me. I think a lot of the personal abuse was unwarranted and unfortunate. Some of the comments were downright cruel and other comments, while more measured and perhaps justifiable, were still highly critical. I know how thin-skinned I was at 19 and I believe his family when they say that he is feeling pretty crushed right now. As some commenters have pointed out, all of this will be archived on the internet forever for prospective employers to find in five years time when doing a name search on Gogarty.

However, I do think it was misguided to commission it in the first place. In order for newspapers to survive and thrive in the era of the blogosphere, they do need to be more open and allow more of a two-way conversation, which Guardian Unlimited has done to great effect. But they also need to remember that they are not MySpace or Facebook and the best way to compete is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Readers of The Guardian turn to it, rather than (or as well as) blogs or social networking sites because they are looking for a certain authority and quality.

There is a place for a variety of voices in the blog section, as long as the quality of the general newspaper reporting, comment and writing does not suffer. But even the blogs do need to be offering something new and it pass a yardstick for quality. I didn’t think there was anything hugely wrong with Max’s style, considering his age, though it’s nothing special. The main problem is the gap-year experience is so common in Britain that it’s not really something new and Max’s background is so typical for media types that it hardly qualifies as adding to diversity - most journalists are not 19, to be sure, but age will cure that one.

Contrary to the travel editor’s assertion, I didn’t see anything in the comments thread to suggest that people wanted more writing by “real people” as opposed to journalists (who, presumably, are robots or aliens). Here’s one response:

“No, I want to read more good journalism, not middle class kids on work experience writing about their holidays, or the last series of Neighbours, especially when they’re handed it on a plate like this. There are a lot of really talented people out there who just want a chance to prove themselves.”

Maybe the editor and I read different comment thread (as I said, it had been moderated by the time I got to it)? The one thing that came through quite strongly when I read both threads was that people wanted GOOD writing, wherever it came from. In fact many of the comments expressed a preference for journalists on the basis that the writing was more likely to be good. Could it be that Andy had already decided to put up more reader writing - had, in fact, got the job on the basis of making the site more Web 2.0 - and was therefore using the comments to justify his decision?

I would be interested to know what my readers think about what they expect from travel newspapers and magazines versus blogs? And whether a blog on a newspaper website should have the standards of the newspaper or the standards of blogs in general? How should old media respond to new media?

I think Max Gogarty has had enough abuse so I will be moderating comments. You are welcome to say whether or not you think The Guardian was right to commission and run the piece but please be civilised - there’s been enough flaming.