Jeff Beckham

Statesman.com general manager Jim Debth told News.com this week that readers have created 875 blogs in the nine months since the site began offering tools for readers to build their own websites.

The newspaper began offering the service last September, and reader blogs are attracting about 2,500 page views per day, according to Debth. Even if those numbers aren’t overwhelming, that’s not necessarily the point, Debth said.

“The idea behind this is to create more of a community,” Debth said. “You create community and you’ll increase traffic and loyalty.”

That’s the right approach, and it’s gratifying to see the Statesman take an open-minded approach to user-generated content. In addition to the reader blogs, the Statesman partners with local company Pluck on a blog syndication service called BlogBurst, which offers up content from more than 1,500 blogs.

One other notable point in the story:

According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share–about 17 percent–among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.