How the Guardian's award-winning website works

1. Start section devoted to incendiary rants and considered opinion on the news of the day.

2. Commission pieces by a woman who hates men, Middle Eastern types who hate Israel, people who hate people who hate Hugo Chavez, some Labour party navel-gazing, and more pieces by a woman who hates men ("fabulous slogans such as "men off the streets"), and making sure your sub-editors stir the pot some more in their straplines ("Until all women stand up together in the struggle against male violence, they will continue to rape, beat and abuse us").

3. Publish many of these at 2am, hence encouraging absolute fruitloops and Americans to respond with shards of abuse, and limiting your ability to deal with them early, so setting the tone for a very skewed debate.

4. Instead of commissioning the earlier incendiary feminist writer to respond to her critics, you commission someone else to write a piece loudly bemoaning the abuse she has received, stirring the pot some more. Get sub-editors to add another strapline to wind people up ("Women in the blogosphere have found their voice and, whether men like it or not, we are here to stay")

5. Remember to mangle the language utterly, peppering it with references to "blogosphere" (it sounded shit years ago and it sounds shit now) and use the peculiar Guardian-only habit of referring to a single entry as a "blog" (wrong) and people who comment on blogs as "bloggers" (errr, no).

6. Publish more abusive comments, and drowning out some of the more sensible gems that lie beneath.

7. Repeat for several years, and collect awards for innovations on the interweb, and publish plenty of back-slapping pieces about how clever you are.

8. Wake up one day realising the lot of women and men hasn't really improved in the time you've been doing this. And wonder why...

The Graun can do it right, of course, like here about Morrissey and here about porn (pal-plugging alert). I just wish it could sort it out on Comment Is Free - it's a waste of a valuable resource.

Comments

[diamond geezer]

I read the articles.
I never read the comments.
That way I waste as little time as possible.

[onionbagblogger]

I couldn't possibly Comment.