blogs and bloggers
A blog (short for weblog) is a type of webpage format that generally utilizes a reverse-chronological order. However, there are strong definitional issues when attempting to elucidate blogs within a journalism context. Unlike traditional media, blogs refer to both the technological means of delivery and the content of that delivery. The means of delivery offers access to a greater proportion of the public than traditional media distribution methods and features, which in turn modifies the types of content created.
Despite not having a concrete definition that clearly separates blogs and bloggers from their traditional media counterparts, blogs and bloggers play a unique role within the modern journalism ecosystem. Blogs and bloggers are shifting the boundaries of what is considered acceptable from journalists, while also acting as a check on the media. Much research on participatory digital journalism has shifted to social media networks and big data as they have come to once again shift the overall atmosphere around online journalism since they came to prominence for the general public in the late 2000s onward. However, blogs and bloggers should not be discredited for their impact on the audience, their interplay with traditional media, the original reporting, and analyses that they have brought to view.
Some scholars have attempted to define the specific characteristics of journalism blogs as a genre or category within the larger journalism sphere while others have claimed that it is not possible to effectively define. In the same way that high-level questions and related concepts like âwhat is and is not considered journalism?â and âwho are and are not considered journalists?â are contentiously debated, blogs and bloggers are not easy concepts to define. Blogs can be viewed within the specific contexts, wherein they reside or in relation to the more general journalism ecosystem. As such, this entry discusses various characteristics and elements that differentiate many (but not all) journalism and journalism-adjacent blogs as well as people behind those blogs.
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From their origins in the 1990s, blogs were initially an avenue for citizen and public journalism. Bloggers were often experts, insiders, and enthusiasts seeking an outlet for their knowledge. One such early example includes Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report that utilized Drudgeâs political connections within right-wing circles as sources. As they grew in popularity, news organizations began to incorporate staff- and topical-based blogs into their offerings. At times, the traditional media created content aggregation agreements with or out-right purchased blogs instead of creating their own, such as The New York Times working with Freakonomics from 2007 to 2011 and Ziff Davis purchasing Mashable in 2017.
Blogs run the gamut of topics, ideologies, specialties, and approaches, although individual blogs generally take a specific niche or focus. Websites such as Crooks and Liars and RedState each cover news and politics, but from an outwardly progressive and conservative bias, respectively. Other sites take a different approach to what they add to the content, such as FiveThirtyEight, which covers a wide range of topics, including politics, sports, news, entertainment, but usually from a statistical analysis perspective. Similarly, sites like Pharyngula unabashedly examine science from the perspective of a âgodless liberal,â which is in the blogâs tagline.
However, one need only look as far as the Huffington Post to understand the difficulty in defining what is and is not a blog and what is and is not a traditional media organization. The Huffington Post historically has had both staff journalists and unpaid contributors. The organization was the first digitally run platform to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. It continued to utilize unpaid contributors until it removed that platform in January 2018. Much of the content that is published is still not necessarily original reporting and functions like an aggregator. Some of the stories involve personal narratives and opinion mixed in with analysis and reporting. The website has specific sections that focus content for different audiences, including a âCommunitiesâ section with subsections for Black Voices, Queer Voices, Women, and more. There are still reporters and editors, but the lines are significantly blurred compared to the traditional structure of newspapers. On top of that, it was acquired by AOL in 2011 and later AOL was acquired by Verizon in 2015, making it part of one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. The website rebranded as HuffPost in 2017 and was again acquired by a different parent company, BuzzFeed, in 2020 after which numerous layoffs occurred. HuffPost still shares some qualities of a blog, including technological, tonal, and topical similarities but also has some elements of more traditional news, including utilizing wire services, limiting access for the comment section for posts to only registered users, and others.
Technological Characteristics
Although blogs are not necessarily built on content management systems (CMS), those CMSs have helped usher in the ease of use and availability of blogs, and websites with a blog component. Services such as Blogger (purchased by Google in 2003), Blogspot, and WordPress provide platforms that allow individuals and organizations to create and distribute blogs. Other forms of blogs, such as the centralized and pseudo-socially networked platform that Medium utilizes, have grown in popularity over time. In fact, WordPress has become such an important platform within the World Wide Web ecosystem that one survey by W3Techs.com estimates that more than 40 percent of all websites are built on the CMS.
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Common features include posts and pages, widgets, comment sections, and more. Blog posts and pages are often differentiated in terms of the timeliness (or timelessness) of the content. Posts are produced, published, and distributed within the main area of a blog in the reverse-chronological order, making up the timely nature of the content. These posts can be supplemented by pages, which are generally more timeless. Pages often include elements like contact information, privacy policies, an âaboutâ page, and more.
Within the overall scope of blogs and blogging technology, a variety of approaches to content creation have come to be. One such approach includes the idea of âlive bloggingâ an event or story, wherein one or more reporters give short and quick updates on the story at hand so the audience can follow along in almost real time. Live blogs can take multiple forms depending on the type of story. Certain stories tend to lend themselves more readily to this format, including political debates and election night coverage. Blogs run by traditional media organizations, such as ABC or The Washington Post, may utilize a live blog to keep the audience apprised of the facts of the event while a nontraditional news organization, such as Politico or Daily Kos, may focus more on real-time analysis of those facts. Both are utilizing the same types of technology to create different content along organizational standard lines. Live blogging is also used to cover some press conferences and product releases. The website MacRumors publishes a live blog whenever Apple holds a press conference to announce new products. Those live blogs often incorporate text and images from the event.
Other technological aspects of blogs can be seen in the differentiation between blogs and microblogs. Microblogs such as Twitter limit the authorâs communications to a small and restricted set of options. In the case of Twitter, one can only post a single tweet with up to 280 characters (up from the previous maximum of 140 characters when the service launched, which at the time aligned with the length of an SMS text message).
Comparisons and Connections With Traditional Media Organizations
Blogs that are independent of news organizations offer different types of coverage and analysis in comparison to those of most mainstream news organizations in the United States. One element that is significantly different is less of an emphasis on objectivity. In many cases, these blogs are not necessarily doing original reporting. However, much of the content is not that type of original reporting but instead an analysis of othersâ reporting. One instance was when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott resigned his leadership post after numerous blogs highlighted and focused on quotes wherein Lott had supported Strom Thurmondâs 1948 presidential candidacy that highlighted numerous racist policy positions after they were originally underreported by other legacy outlets. Those legacy outlets, in turn, then covered the story again but focused on the angle highlighted by the bloggers. Other instances often involve augmenting the reporting with additional sources, context, opinion, and facts, among other elements. Examples of those blogs include the previously mentioned Crooks and Liars and RedState that generally bring together information from a variety of different sources and cases to analyze a news story from their specific political perspectives.
In that respect, blogs and bloggers do have distinct roles that often do not necessarily mirror that of traditional journalism outlets. One such shift is the distinction in that there is a different division of labor. If a blog is run by an individual, they would be handling all of the writing, editing, managing, distribution, advertising, and essential functions that are often separated across numerous individuals and roles within a traditional organization. One positive is that it allows a more nimble and agile approach that does not require numerous layers of reporters and editors prior to publication. With that, one might be more apt to make errors but with the added advantage of being able to publish more quickly when focusing on the timeliness of a story. Those same blurred lines can still occur even in organizations where the traditional structure may not apply. Generally, as blogs become more popular and post more frequently, they take on a different organizational structure that more closely mirrors that of traditional media. Such structure then leads those blogs to focus on highlighting traditional journalistic values, including focusing on original reporting and separating editorial and business operations.
Over the course of their existences, some blogs have gone from independent to aligned/converged with corporate media, including the website FiveThirtyEight. The website was founded in 2008 by Nate Silver, a statistician who had been working as a baseball analyst and blogging on the political site Daily Kos. He founded FiveThirtyEight as an independent blog, but formed a content agreement with The New York Times in 2010. With that agreement, some of the content characteristics (such as frequency of posting and length of articles) and authorship shifted, thereby highlighting how traditional, corporate influence can either directly or indirectly manipulate a blogâs content. ESPN then acquired FiveThirtyEight in 2013 with a plan to broaden the site to include sports and economics along with politics. In 2018, FiveThirtyEight moved to ABC News, which shares the corporate parent Disney with ESPN.
Blogs often invite direct communication with the audience in a way distinct from the traditional media. For traditional media, there are limited means wherein the audience can communicate with the organization, including letters to the editor, calling the office, commenting on the organizationâs website. Many traditional journalism providers, including NPR, Popular Science, and Reuters, have limited online comments as they work to determine how best to monitor and display comments. For blogs, the participatory nature of interaction between the audience and the authors is often viewed as a defining quality, particularly in the form of comments.
One must also consider the role of blogs within the sociopolitical arena to which they are compared. For blogs in countries that utilize state-run media, they can act as a voice against the hegemonic control of the government. The increasing access to the technology that makes the blogs possible allows for more dissenting opinions voiced. However, those blogs and the bloggers that write for them do still have to worry about attempted censorship and threats of violence.
Comparisons and Connections With Traditional Journalists
Blogs offer a different venue for individuals to counter the traditional gatekeeping role over which the mass media have generally had control. Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, in part founded the blog as a means of challenging what he viewed as a lack of input from the average person in the dominant narrative coming from media organizations and elite journalists. Similarly, others have questioned whether blogs under the umbrella of corporate media organizations are qualitatively within the category of blogs as the bloggers themselves do not have as much freedom within the organizationâs editorial and ownership structure. From there, one role that independent bloggers can have that is not duplicated by traditional journalists is that of the âfifth estate,â wherein bloggers act as a watchdog of the journalists. While there is the role of the ombudsperson or public editor for singular publications, a watchdog blogger can look for greater trends and issues across the journalism spectrum. A watchdog blogger can offer their critiques across different organizations to see if journalism as a wholeârather than within a single organizationâis displaying a particular issue, concern, or trend.
There is a symbiotic relationship between traditional journalists and bloggers. That relationship can be more particularly pronounced in niche content areas. Topics such as science or business journalism that often require specific training and knowledge to communicate the often wonkish details or context of a story, while at the same time those areas receive relatively fewer resources within traditional media, can bring bloggers that do not view themselves as journalists to the fore. From there, journalists can learn from the expert bloggers to shift the agenda or practice their gatekeeping function differently. Research has also shown an intermedia agenda setting function of the traditional news organizations on bloggers with many posts linking back to corporate media websites. Additionally, as reported by Homero Gil de ZĂșñiga and colleagues in 2011, over time, more bloggers have come to view their work as journalism.
Although not unique to blogs, hyperlinks are a central element in the content of blogs. The hyperlinks act as a verifiable source for the audience to make decisions about the source material for themselves. Instead of simply quoting an original source without the full context of the surrounding information, the users can choose whether or not to follow the link and better understand the veracity of the authorâs claim or statement. The hyperlinks support the type of content that many bloggers create: analysis and opinion based on facts and othersâ original reporting. The bloggers can then contextualize and combine the various reports together to create something new. These links also function as a means of highlighting other, similar sources, which in turn can lead to those other sources linking back to the original blog. However, some have criticized this practice as a means of creating echo chambers within the digital sphere.
In line with the shifting news values illustrated by blogs in comparison to traditional media, many bloggers also shift the lines in terms of what is generally considered acceptable behavior by newspeople. For example, many organizations have specific codes of ethics and conduct that outline what objectivity and subjectivity mean for the organization and what conduct is considered acceptable and unacceptable for its reporters. Bloggers, on the other hand, often include elements of their identity and self-presentation front and center in their coverage and analysis. There has been some loosening on those expectations for traditional journalists, which varies significantly by organization, beat, and medium. Additionally, traditional journalists may have more leeway around identity and self-presentation through personal social media channels rather than incorporated into pieces published by their organizations.
The audienceâs reaction to the differentiation between bloggers and journalists is another important characteristic. Various studies have looked at the uses and gratifications for why the audience seeks out independent bloggers (either amateur or professional) in contrast to journalists. For some, there is a strong distrust for anything that is aligned with corporate media influence. Others want the analysis that is included with the specific slant of their choice. The genre, topic, and presentation of the blog also dictates how the audience views the credibility of the blogger. One example includes looking at amateur war bloggersâsometimes soldiers themselvesâin contrast to war journalists. The journalists were viewed to have less credibility on the events of war as they are disconnected from the fighting and firsthand experience of the soldiers. However, the bloggers had more credibility as they could include personal narratives that described their experiences on the ground in a way that traditional journalism norms did not allow.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.