1) Research topic and researchers: Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena, by Stephen Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and, Jaekwan Jeong, in Journalism 8 (3)(2007) pp. 235-261. Retrieved from EBSCO: Communication and Mass Media, Article Link, on February 20, 2007.
2) Rationale of the study: The researchers were highlighting the shift in the mainstream media to include a new wave of news outlets called blogs. The increased amount of news and accessibility to the current events combined with the low cost of creating new blogs has produced a boom in the use of blogs. Increased globalization has broken down geographic boundaries and now lines are formed along news stories, especially on user-created blogs.
3) Literature Review: Reese and others cited other research that discussed the forms of new media have taken in the past few years. Deuze (2003) offers that when the mainstream media goes online, it takes an all-new form that allows for the reader to become more engaged. Blogs provide an attractive means of obtaining news as opposed to the professional media because of the ease of use, low barriers, and easy interactivity among people all over the world (Reese et al., 239). The researchers also noted that political boundaries are far more apparent in online forms of news, blogs in particular. Blogs are created to enforce a certain political viewpoint while at the same time linking to other like-minded blogs. This creates a sort of link in-breeding among various political viewpoints (240). Because the Internet crosses almost all geographic boundaries, cross national connections would be formed along political lines.
Research Questions:
1) To what extent do blogs link to the professional news media, and how are those references characterized?
2) How is political affiliation of blogs related to their linking to professional news media?
3) How is political affiliation of blogs related to the affiliation of their linking choices.
4) How is political affiliation of blogs related to their linking to international sites and authors?
4) Research Method: The researchers used content-analysis to look at six blogs they reasoned to be very stable and reputable among the blogging community.
5) Subject of the study: Six blogs were chosen for the study. They noted the political ideology of the blogs, the type of user interactivity was available, as well as what sites were linked to on the blog itself. The research took place over a full week, February 6-13 of 2005. The number of posts on each blog per story was noted as well as what feedback was posted in response to the blog’s author’s posts.
6) Research Findings: The researchers confirmed one research question as to how the blogs garner news stories and then post online about the story. The most common form of post was offering commentary on news stories that the mainstream “professional media” had offered. Over 60% of the blog posts offered analysis of the news stories.
They found that both liberal blogs linked more to government websites, citizen public interest sites, as well as mainstream news media sites. Conservative blogs linked to other blogs more often.
Not surprisingly, the links to other sites on each blog generally followed the same political ideological stance as its linker. However, over half of the links on both liberal and conservative blogs linked to non-partisan sites such as mainstream news outlets like the Wall Street Journal’s Opinionjournal.com.
7) My opinion on the scholarly article: Overall, I found the article to be a very concrete example showing the make up of popular political blogs. For the most part, I was unaware of the linking that occurs on most blogs. I wish the authors would have explained this as well as the linking units that were measured. The data tables were clearly labeled which allowed for a greater understanding to the researcher’s writing. A wide variety of data was studied which made the article worthwhile. By only studying one aspect of blogs, for example, other factors are left out that might have influenced the data that was collected.
After reading this article, I am more aware of what I put on my blog as well as who or what I am linking to.
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