The winner of the blog contest, which 'TOP says about 10,000 people voted on, was 2 Birds, 1 Blog, narrowly edging out GW Slept Here and Prince of Petworth.

Next week, 'TOP will tell the world what the best Italian restaurant in the area is—City Desk is waiting eagerly!

Well, the Post is now thinking that its 90-odd blogs are just too much for one newspaper Web site.

Good thinkin'!

Check out the memo, post-jump.

Colleagues,

Please find a link to an updated and complete list of blogs on washingtonpost.com: http://blog.washingtonpost.com.

It is the first step in what has been an ongoing, comprehensive review of all our blogs. You will notice that we have now classified 32 blogs as archived. Dozens of other blogs that were dormant have been spiked. This still leaves us about 90 "active" blogs for now.

While we will continue to regularly add new blogs that are topical and relevant to our 'For and About Washington' strategy, we plan to ask editors, especially our Innovation Editors, to take a closer look over the next month or so at all active blogs, using current traffic, audience participation and page view trends as key measures. And here is why:

Typically, 10 blogs on washingtonpost.com account for about 60% of all our blog page views in any given week. The top 20 blogs account for 79% of all weekly blog page views. There is usually very little change in which blogs make our top 20 list.

The next 30 blogs collectively add 18% more blog page views. This means that 50 of our blogs generate 97.3% of all our blog page views. The remaining 40 or so blogs generally contribute about 2.7% of blog page views while taking up significant time and resources both from reporters and editors.

Obviously, we want to be sure that we are nurturing new blogs or blogs that are highly topical/seasonal, and those that significantly complement our overall coverage on a given topic. We also want to support those blogs that are showing consistent upward momentum with readers even if their current page view base is small. But, at the same time, we want to make sure that we are not diverting limited resources—reporting, editing, tools, marketing–away from our better performing blogs.

Most editors in the newsroom have by now received training on pulling traffic data on blogs, so please ask your editor if you want specific trend information on your blog. Feel free to drop Sandy Sugawara on the Universal News Desk or me a note if you have more questions.

Thank you,
Raju [Narisetti]

Thus comes to a halt one of the industry's most luxurious gravy trains. Several years ago, when the Post started launching blogs like bottle rockets, a two-caste compensation system evolved. Big stars, like Marc Fisher and Joel Achenbach, got paid. Grunts on the Metro desk and elswhere didn't.

Longtime staffer Achenbach, writer of the Post’s Achenblog, told the Washington City Paper in 2006, “I get some compensation for the blog, and I certainly hope they have a system that’s fair to everyone.”

At that time, fairness would have required paying the nonstars for their blogging contributions, and the paper—even in those pre-worst-financial-crisis-since-whenever times—wasn't going to heave the sod to level this particular playing field. Nowadays, fairness at the Post is achieved the same way it's happening across the industry. By slashing everything, that is.

The cost-saving edict will fall hard on newsroom vets who participate in regular chats on washingtonpost.com. The going price for such contributions is $100 per session, so a weekly chatter could expect about $5,000 in extra earnings per year. Pure gravy there–chats are done during business hours, and they often help reporters develop sources and story ideas. That the paper has paid extra for this stuff is a great tribute to its once-freewheeling approach to journalism.

Says Paul Farhi, a Style staffer who has long cranked out chats for the site: "I love doing my weekly chat. I've said all along that I'd do it even if they didn't pay me for it. And now it looks like I'm about to get my wish."

The no-pay policy also applies to the contributions of Web staff to the paper–whereas these folks formerly got paid freelance wages for their dead-tree work, now they'll get nothing. Or, perhaps more likely, they just won't contribute anymore.

Below, the memo, complete with interruptions.

To: Newsroom Staffs
From: Shirley Carswell

As we fully integrate the web and print newsrooms and reach our readers through print and online, our system of making “freelance” payments to newspaper staff for regular chats and blogs and to dot.com staff for occasional stories in the paper is no longer practical.

How about a shorter, truer version: We can no longer afford to make extra payments to our staffers for their contributions to the paper or the Web site.

Effective immediately, such payments to employees of Washington Post Media will end.

Better.

For special work done on your own time, please speak to the assigning editor in advance about compensation.

And be prepared for your assigning editor to look at you like you're crazy.

If you have questions about this change, please contact your supervisor. Thanks for your understanding as we work through this integration.

In other words, don't bother complaining.

Because no one has time to incorporate 100 blogs into a Google reader, I tackled the list and picked a handful of really good blogs for you! Enjoy! (Click through for the truncated list, descriptions, and links).

• The Big Picture: "The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com's Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm's MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting."
• The Beat: "The news blog of comic culture."
• Garfield – Garfield: "Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."
• Got Medieval: "Got Medieval* is a blog. You may have heard of them. The blog was originally conceived as a place to gripe about how the mainstream media does not understand the Middle Ages, but it has drifted evolved to include discussions of medieval marginalia, Angelina Jolie, and <strike>-tag jokes. The posts are often punctuated with superfluous Pratchettesque footnotes.**
  Got Medieval is written by Carl S. Pyrdum, III, a graduate student in Medieval Studies at Yale University, who is currently living in Macon, GA, while he finishes his dissertation and looks for a proper academic job. Carl has a Bacon Number of 4, easily the lowest Bacon number of any proper academic medievalist.***"
• Indexed: Pencils, scheaves of notebook paper, and life.
• InventorSpot: Weird inventions. (Later tonight I'm going to sketch up my Lawn Lazer and send it in.)

Lots of other notables (including every Gawker blog except Gawker itself). Sites that didn't make PC Mag's list that I highly recommend include Juxtapoz (lowbrow & underground art), Vive Cool City (video site out of Australia–jaw-droppingly edgy), and 10 Zen Monkeys (tech feature writing).

Reader recs welcome in the comments.

Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day.

There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today, expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour.

But are we really more informed? Are we getting a wider range of news?

CJR's Bree Nordenson has a great piece that unpacks these questions and looks into how the new journalism paradigm has to change to stay relevant (hint: less generating, more filtrating).

Studies show that the massive inflow of information is making readers repel news for its uncomfortable ubiquity – it's fatiguing (click "mark all as read" in Google reader, anyone?).

I have to admit, there's something really gratifying about reading a newspaper. Its space and information are finite. There are no links to other blogs that link to other blogs that link to New York Times stories. It feels complete. I can read multiple paragraphs without my attention drifting off to a gchat ring. But, c'mon, I want up-to-the-minute updates!

The tweets, blog updates, RSS rolls, and ceaseless e-mail alerts lead to what Nordenson calls "self-asphyxiation."

"In order to garner audience attention and maintain financial viability, media outlets are increasingly concerned with the 'stickiness' of their content."

Another symptom of this straining media environment is "nichification."

"As information proliferates, meanwhile, people inevitably become more specialized both in their careers and their interests ... shared public knowledge is receding, as is the likelihood that we come in contact with beliefs that contradict our own."

OK, you get it, the Internet is cutting our collective attention spans and making our news consumption more Huffington Postian and less expansive. But what hasn't the Internet changed? Our insatiable information craving. Nordenson reports:

“'Oddly enough, information is one of the things that in the end needs brands almost more than anything else,” explains Paul Duguid. 'It needs a recommendation, a seal of approval, something that says this is reliable or true or whatever. And so journalists, but also the institutions of journalism as one aspect of this, become very important.'”'

My job in a few years? To totally assure you that information is, like, true.

Dearest Readers,

Does Fuego/Frio leave you cold?

Have you found yourself wishing that Loose Lips meant something a little bawdier?

Is City Desk, for all its inimitable accomplishments, a bit...well, flaccid?

Then cower no longer 'neath the sterile quilt of sensual deprivation! The Sexist, our new sex & gender blog, is here to fulfill all your procreative blogging needs.

Helmed by the ever-scintillating Amanda Hess, The Sexist will cover such hot-button issues as "feminism, dating, STD testing, fearing children, G, L, B, T, fucking, and David Bowie," according to the inaugural post.

While you wait for that first Bowie interview, be sure to peruse Amanda's day-one offerings.

Let the sexy time begin!