liveblogging

Objectivity and the Journalistic Voice

Certain conventions of objectivity, such as the absence of personal voice, are challenged by the co-presence of the journalist and the audience in the face of a live and unfolding event. Journalists must also deal with balancing perspectives in real time, where sources are scattered among social media and other networks. This provides a rich context in which to study the objectivity norm in liveblogging.

Networked Journalism

Several scholars have suggested a shift in the role of journalists from authoritative narrators to curators or “gatewatchers,” who gather, sift, verify, and interpret material but play weaker gatekeeper roles. Liveblogs are a good example of this decentered model of journalism, in which journalists are collecting key parts of the unfolding story from various sources and circulating them while they (as the author) are still subject to the unpredictable nature of the event itself.

Participatory Journalism

Here, facilitated by technological advances and participatory culture, journalists are seen to move from a hierarchical model of information disseminators to a more horizontal model based on audience participation and conversational modes of communication. Within this discourse, the lines between creators and consumers of information increasingly blur, thus potentially empowering audiences. Given this backdrop, researchers of liveblogs are examining the reality of participatory journalism in newsrooms and journalists’ practices.

News Sourcing

Historically, the elite-centric nature of journalistic news sourcing has been the subject of much criticism in journalism-studies literature, but these debates are being revisited in light of the growth of new journalistic formats. In the case of liveblogs, they have been popularized alongside the contemporary culture of online participation, which broadens the available pool of potential sources and places both elite and nonelite sources on the same social media platforms. A theoretical (and empirical) question is, therefore, whether liveblogs are a disruptive platform for opening up the news to more voices compared with more conventional formats, or whether they perpetuate traditional sourcing patterns.

Epistemology

Building on the recognition that liveblogs disrupt both sourcing practices and narrative dynamics of conventional story-based journalism, some scholars have in recent years argued that liveblogs have a different epistemic characteristic. That is, they engender a different form of knowledge creation than does a summative news article. The transparent nature of providing live updates—often with caveats about accuracy or sometimes later corrections—captures simultaneously a claim to immediacy and uncertainty that has a unique epistemic value in its own right.

Audiences

Surveys of audiences, alongside user data accessed from news organizations, have revealed news readers’ use of, participation with, and attitudes to liveblogs. Some studies have found that readers perceive liveblogs to be more balanced and objective than other news reports, partly because of the range of opinions that they report and the transparency of the sourcing practices.

Newsrooms

Typically based on interviews with journalists, newsroom studies offer some valuable insights on the journalistic practices of livebloggers and their relationship with audiences. These studies confirm the demand for audience interaction with liveblogs, though they also document the various filters that audience material must go through before being published. High on this list is verification. Here, while some have found rather looser cultures of corroboration in liveblogging, most newsroom studies find—at least when it comes to crisis events—that verifying audience material is a major obstacle to including more diverse voices in the news. Given the immediacy of liveblogs, newsroom studies find that journalists often rely on mainstream sources such as other news organizations.

Content

A smaller number of studies have examined the content of liveblogs. Here, research has revealed, for example, how audience and journalistic frames interact and compete in liveblogs, where in a space of potential co-production, journalists still reframe amateur contributions by appending their own frames onto them. Other studies have focused on the role of the journalist, finding that some sports journalists embrace a norm of subjectivity in their interaction with readers in order to attract partners in dialogue among the audience. Another strand of content studies looks at how competition between news organizations not only determines whether they run a liveblog but also influences editorial strategies toward the event itself.

Sourcing

Similar to other empirical approaches, sourcing analysis studies are also preoccupied with questions of audience voice, among wider questions of power and access to public debate. The question of who gets to speak in liveblogs does not seem to have a uniform answer. Studies find that news genres such as sports offer greater opportunity for audience participation than crisis or politics, whose sourcing practices remain quite traditional. Furthermore, while liveblogs rely heavily on social media content, it is more likely from elite sources than everyday citizens or eyewitnesses.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.