Does the Guardian get it

The Guardian newspaper sees its future in its online, free version. As someone who has bought the paper version for a very long time I thought I would try it out online.

I had something to explore. Specifically I had become very dissatisfied with one aspect of the daily paper - it has a disastrous coverage of the sport I follow which is athletics. A couple of examples: it wasn't able to afford the train fare to Birmingham to send a correspondent to the national championships; it didn't give the team selection for the European Championships. Although it did manage an article on the gender issues of one South African athlete. So I'm a long-term reader with a distinct feeling of being ignored. Should I change my newspaper?

Before I do that how do I get my dissatisfaction across to the people at the Guardian. Just as they didn't understand their readers about the Doonesbury cartoon strip I suspect they also are not in tune with how many readers have got passionate interest in sports other than football. The readers editor is for errors, not about content complaints. A letter for publication would likely to be too long to get published and the people in the sports department (whoever they are - who is the sports editor?) would not read it.

So I turned to the website. Surely I could interact with the sports editors through it? Under one link I found:

"The guardian.co.uk site provides a growing number of opportunities for readers who wish to discuss content we publish or debate more generally."

What this implies, and what comes over through the multifarious pages of guidelines, is that readers can discuss and thus create new content, but the Guardian is not interested in the readers view of how it approaches such issues as the sports it chooses to follow.

I don't expect that the Guardian will be particularly interested in the sense of alienation it has created in this reader.

The real point of this post is that the website reflects an approach in which the Guardian staff are not part of the community they claim to want to foster. It is in this sense that Guardian staff (web site managers? editors?) don't "get" social media. Until they actively invite comment on the whole content of what is being published, they will not fully involve readers.