Internet users’ participation and news framing: The Strauss-Kahn case

Abstract

This article analyses Internet users’ participation and the ways in which it is framed by journalists, with a particular focus on the Live Blog format. It provides a case study of the online media coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York in May 2011, by the highly respected media Le Monde.fr. A lexicometric (statistical) and discourse (qualitative) analysis of two sets of corpora (Corpus 1 being composed of all the comments submitted by Internet users throughout the live blogging process and Corpus 2 of the few which were finally published on the Live Blog) will highlight the nature and the various forms of audience participation as well as the ways in which they are framed by journalists. The article aims to investigate the representativeness of the published messages and the participative audience profile which journalists foreground within this media space of multiple voices.

Keywords

Digital journalism journalistic norms lexicometric analysis live blogging media framing participatory journalism public

Introduction

The first decade of the 20th century has witnessed the development of live blogging (McDougall, 2011; Steensen, 2012, 2014; Thurman and Walters, 2012), a web-based practice defined as a ‘single blog post on a specific topic to which time-stamped content is progressively added for a finite period – anything between half an hour and 24 hours’ (Thurman and Walters, 2012: 83).

Live blogging favours the accumulation of content and sources (with the integration of web 2.0 contents, social media, videos, etc.) and is anchored in a participative pattern allowing readers to contribute to the elaboration of live information. As Steensen (2012) points out, ‘the utilisation of such technology potentially changes journalism from being a disseminator of source-driven and framed bits of information to a public, to an event-driven, audience involving and thus conversational practice of mass-communication’. This perspective reminds the mythifying discourse that came with the emergence of participatory journalism in the early 2000s and the hope of a takeover by the audience (Bowman and Willis, 2003; Gillmor, 2004; Jarvis, 2006; Rosen, 2006). Within this discourse, as a result of the increased horizontality of exchanges, the frontier between producers and consumers of information should tend to blur – giving way to what Jenkins (2006: 31–36) refers to as ‘creative participants’ and Bruns (2010) as ‘produsers’.

These very optimistic speeches by the participation popularizers have led researchers to question their reality in newsrooms and journalists’ practices. Studies converge and have found that user participation is actually controlled and regulated by journalists who do maintain their gatekeeper function (Singer et al., 2011). The opening is controlled and remains at the margins of the core of the editorial process. Contributions from the audience do not modify journalists’ procedures and prerogatives. Complementary in purpose and method to these studies, our work aims to further the understanding of audience participation. More specifically, it intends to question the reality of audience participation in live blogging, a digital native news format. Users’ participation lies at the heart of the editorial promise and reading contract of live blogging. As far as our method is concerned, it differs from previous studies in the sense that instead of emphasizing observational surveys and interviews in newsrooms, it proposes a discursive analysis of participation and an objectivation of its content. In doing so, we intend to bring a deeper understanding of journalistic practices in relation to the management of participation and to address the following question: is participation only a myth, as put forward by Domingo (2008), or does it correspond to an actual co-construction of information and to a profound cultural turn among journalists (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001)?

Our focus is placed on a specific Live Blog, led by the highly respected media Le Monde.fr when the Strauss-Kahn case broke the headlines, that is, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as a potential candidate for the 2012 French presidential elections, was arrested in May 2011 in New York. Some facts are salient in the timeline of events. At 4:40 p.m. (New York; Paris – 10:40 p.m.) Saturday, 14 May, DSK was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport a few minutes before take-off to Paris. The case came out on Twitter at 4:59 p.m. (New York) and in the press (New York Post) at 6:33 p.m. Le Monde.fr began its live blogging coverage at 7:15 a.m. (New York; Paris – 1:15 a.m.). On Sunday, 15 May, DSK pleaded not guilty for sexual assault, rape attempt and unlawful confinement charges. The Le Monde.fr live coverage continued on the following day, Monday, 16 May, when the judge denied bail and ordered his incarceration at Rikers Island prison.

In its broad sense, the Live Blog format can be defined as a single post, which is updated as the event unfolds with pieces of information provided in a reverse chronological way. As McDougall (2011) explains, ‘the continuously-updating nature of the post itself means that each update attempts to capture some small element of the story, and the updates interact with each other by correcting or modifying previous updates’.

As such, the live blogging of Le Monde.fr constitutes a relevant case study given its length (more than 40 hours of non-stop), the exceptional size of its audience (2.5 million visits) and its ‘uncertainty’ logic (Knight, 1921). For Knight (1921), when facing the uncertainty of the unfolding of an event which can hardly be anticipated, journalists have to moderate comments and to frame their own information from the flow of messages.

But first and foremost, it is its participatory dimension and its management by journalists which draw our attention. In this case study, Internet users’ participation represents no less than one-third of the published messages on the Live Blog. Nevertheless, interviews with journalists who have worked on this Live Blog show that these messages constituted a tiny minority of the messages that had been sent by Internet users through the comment window integrated to the blog. If for some Live Blogs all messages sent by Internet users are published (as underlined by Steensen, 2012 for the Norwegian case he has analysed), Le Monde.fr Live Blogs often generate a high number of comments that need to be moderated and filtered by journalists. In the case of the Live Blog analysed here, less than 1% of the messages submitted by Internet users were finally selected and published by journalists. It is thus this visible face of the live this article seeks to examine so as to evidence the modalities of filtering and framing of amateur participation and to investigate the representativeness of the selected messages, with a particular focus on their theme and type of contribution. It is hoped that the new analytical approach to live blogging offered here will contribute complementarily to the existing scholarship on this fast-growing digital format.

Methodology

The methodological and theoretical contribution of this study lies in the comparison between unpublished and published comments, using both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Corpus 1 is composed of all Internet users’ messages (20,339 contributions both published and unpublished). The research team was granted access to the back office data and thus to all comments submitted by users and exported in a CSV file, by the chief editor of Le Monde.fr. Corpus 2 corresponds to the visible part of the Live Blog and is made up of the 766 published messages from Internet users and journalists. This corpus was constituted by a copying from the published live on Le Monde.fr. These two corpora will be analysed and compared with a view to identifying fine indicators of the lexical universes (Reinert, 2008) that are co-constructed as the live blogging process unfolds. These universes will be considered as the language materialization of the ways in which live blogging actors (be they amateur or professional) apprehend and frame news stories. In fact, as Entman (1993) puts it,

To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. (p. 52)

In this light, by analysing each corpus, this study aims to identify which aspects of events have been foregrounded throughout the live blogging process.

As regards Corpus 1, after identifying the universes of discourse, 8000 messages submitted by Internet users within the first 24 hours of live blogging on the Strauss-Kahn case were manually analysed so as to capture the types of contribution mobilized (i.e. questions, comments and information inputs). As regards Corpus 2, the emphasis was placed on the profile of contributors (distinguishing journalists from ‘amateur contributors’) and on how they relate to the universes of discourse identified through the lexicometric analysis.

The resort to Iramuteq,¹ a free software programme for textual statistics (Lebart and Salem, 1994), allowed for a comparison between these two corpora throughout the analysis. Then, the results were checked and enriched through a subsequent qualitative analysis carried out on selected excerpts of the corpus. As far as the technical aspects are concerned, there are two successive and basic operations called ‘segmentation’ and ‘partition’, which are at the core of the textual data analysis led by any textual statistic software. ‘Segmentation’ consists of cutting the text into minimal lexical units, that is, ‘lexical forms’ also commonly referred to as ‘words’. ‘Partition’ consists of splitting and gathering texts (here, referred to as ‘contributions’) according to extra-textual characteristics such as publication phases and contributors’ status. Thus, Iramuteq (like any lexicometry software programme) elaborates a double-entry table which crosses lexical forms (rows) with excerpts (columns). This allows for calculating, for example, the recurrence of words from the lexicon in the different publication phases or the frequency of their use by contributors. It is on the basis of this table that several statistical operations are then made so as to determine whether potential imbalances observed between excerpts are statistically significant. Among these operations, the method of ‘top-down hierarchical classification’ (Reinert, 1983) implemented in Iramuteq (Ratinaud and Dejean, 2009) splits the text into segments of equal length (the scale is that of a sentence) and then proceeds to codify the presence or absence of each form within each segment.

Thanks to this coding, the programme can construct categories of discourse upon segments that contain the same words (Marchand, 2007). Discourse categories are thus constituted by lexical forms that co-occur to a greater extent within segments, forming what Reinert (2008) defines as ‘lexical universes’ (univers lexicaux), that is, mental and linguistic spaces within which speakers settle their discourse. This ‘clustering’ method, which consists of grouping utterances according to word co-occurrences, is widely used, particularly in media frame studies (Baumgartner and Mahoney, 2008; Giles and Shaw, 2009; Matthes and Kohring, 2008).

Results

Convergences and divergences between submitted and published messages

The major point of our study was to compare contributions submitted by Internet users (Corpus 1) with the actual Live Blog ‘end-product’ as published on the Le Monde journal website (Corpus 2). Arising from the task of moderation, which is continuously carried out by journalists working in relay for 40 hours, the Live Blog represents the visible facet of Internet users’ exchanges and contributions (indeed, only 1% of submitted messages were published on the Live Blog by journalists). It takes shape within a setting of multiple voices, as we will see further. This raises the challenge of uncovering the universes of discourse foregrounded – or made salient in Entman’s (1993) terms – by this polyphony, as well as the type of contributors associated with each of these lexical universes. As the participative discourse is reconstructed, Internet readers no longer appear as the only speakers since they share the digital public space with journalists (the ones with the ability to moderate and manage people’s right to speak and to exchange).

To fulfil this comparative objective, two divisive hierarchical cluster analyses were carried out so as to identify convergences and divergences between both corpora, regarding the universes of discourse featured by each of them. Corpus 1 is composed of all messages submitted by Internet users. It amounts to 20,339 contributions, both published and unpublished, whereas Corpus 2 only amounts to 766 posts, composed of 275 messages authored by amateur contributors, 458 messages by Le Monde.fr journalists and 33 messages by journalists from other media passed on via Twitter.

The cluster analysis led to identifying eight categories or universes of discourse in Corpus 1 and the same number in Corpus 2. As illustrated in the table provided below, the majority of categories from one corpus overlap to a great extent with those of the other. For each corpus, the table provides on the left column the list of categories whose name is preceded by the number of the corpus to which they belong. It provides also the proportion (as a percentage) of the messages it contains in relation to the total corpus (second column), the 20 forms that are the most significant for the category in question (third column). Finally, the table indicates the status of its main contributors (fourth column) for Corpus 2 only.

As we shall see, despite the overlap between the two corpora, there are also some evolutions and distortions – resulting from both the moderation and production of messages by Le Monde.fr journalists.

At first, journalists appear very present in most of the lexical categories from Corpus 2: out of eight universes of discourse identified, four appear to be more favoured by journalists’ framing processes (hyperlinks to articles, the socialist primary elections issue, consequences for the IMF, detention and Strauss-Kahn’s defence preparation), and one belongs to the live tweet done by other medias journalists. Actually, only two universes of discourse really mix journalist and amateur contributors (judicial proceeding and versions of facts) and only one is addressed in significant ways by Internet users (preliminary hearing, conjectures on the judge’s decision). A quick overview of the cluster analysis leads to observing a certain similarity between the discourse categories of the published Live Blog (Corpus 2) and that of the Internet users’ submitted messages (Corpus 1). This first observation, however, has to be nuanced by a more detailed examination of the nature of the categories. In this sense, the analytical focus must be placed on the continuities and substantial discontinuities or distortions of the discourse that end up being published on the Live Blog, as a result of journalists’ actual discursive rearrangement of Internet users’ messages.²

In the published Live Blog, Category 2.8 (10.26% of the corpus, see Table 1) distinguishes itself most from the others. Equally addressed by Le Monde.fr journalists and Internet users, it is essentially constituted by contributions which question the US judicial system and propose hypotheses on the process and outcome of the case, the penalties risked by Strauss-Kahn and the plea strategy, as in the following characteristic excerpt:

Table 1.

Comparative and synthetic table of lexical forms between Corpus 1 (all messages submitted during the live blogging process) and Corpus 2 (messages published in the final Live Blog).

Corpus 2 (posts published on Live Blog)Total : 766 posts				Corpus 1 (all messages submitted by Internet users)Total: 20,339 messages
Categories	% of corpus	The 20 most significant forms a	Main contributors	Categories overlapping with Corpus 2	% of corpus	The 20 most significant forms
2.1 Live tweet from journalists, with the publication of photographs taken at the courtroom in particular	13.70	twitter, photo, format, courtroom, status, daftkurt, hearing, May, correspondent, com, dufourdufour, balasseny, lodging, take, criminal, present, account, daily, tv, jonswaine	Journalists on Twitter	None
2.2Links towards articles of Le Monde (including its blogs) and of the NY Times.	18.54	fr, lemonde, http, politics/al, www, article, html, lire, ens_id, blog, synthesis, banon, tristane, link, chat, after, php, monde, case, subscribers	Le Monde	1.8Links towards articles and sources	4.65	http, www, com, html, video, the, wat, 11423_2hccx_, ardisson, and, tv, of, imf, php, he, was, that, watch, is, at
2.3Detention, interview between Strauss-Kahn and his lawyer, preparation for the defence	18.54	strauss, kahn, dominique, paris, york, precinct, new, hour, lawyer, morning, harlem, court, benjamin, brafman, wait, leave, appear, director, place, interrogate	Le Monde	1.1Arrest, police narrative and Strauss-Kahn’s possible escape attempt	20.02	police, hour, maid, aggression, information, phone, lunch, presume, mobile, scratch, time, trace, 1 p.m., victim, airport, plane, info, flight, call
				1.6Preliminary hearing and speculations on the judge’s decision	15.21	hearing, judge, bail, detention, room, May, trial, jury, audition, appearance, result, liberty, prison, last, court, friday, decision, preventive, test, release
2.4Versions of events at the hotel and depositions (accusation, defence, police)	9.33	room, woman, police, investigator, mobile, body, presume, cleaning, telephone, victim, source, guard, new_yorkee, hotel, sofitel, version, indicate, formally, carry out, precise	All	1.4Interrogations on the unfolding events at the hotel and the behaviour of the maid	12.14	room, lady, cleaning, hotel, suite, sofitel, body, camera, client, come in, occupy, surveillance, video, get in, guard, security, get out, entry, shower, corridor
				1.1Arrest, police narrative and Strauss-Kahn’s possible escape attempt	20.02	police, hour, maid, assault, information, telephone, lunch, presume, mobile, scratch, schedule, mark, 1pm, victim, airport, plane, info, flight, call, alibi
2.5Preliminary hearing and hypotheses on the judge’s decision	13.93	bail, explain, dollar, wall_street, canada, journal, user, plaintiff, marry, expert, bath, deputy, advance, give, report, english, reputation, comment, true, amount	Internet users	1.6Preliminary hearing and speculations on the judge’s decision	15.21	hearing, judge, bail, detention, courtroom, May, trial, jury, hearing, appearance, result, liberty, prison, last, tribunal, friday, decision, preventive, test, release
2.6Consequences of Strauss-Kahn arrest on the IMF and the world financial agenda	7.67	meeting, imf, administration, council, lipsky, function, manner, informal, funds, john, zone, touch, take, monetary, euro, announce, ministre, monday, first deputy, temporary	Le Monde	1.3Consequences of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on the French and international political life	18.55	Political, world, man, french, case, reaction, life, imf, president, comment, right, go, react, shame, too much, sarkozy, country, career, media, end
2.7Socialist primary elections for Presidential elections and impact of the case on the French political life	8.03	socialist, primary, aubry, candidate, martine, presidential, thunder, clap, secretary, candidacy, election, royal, hamon, lo leave, ps, underline, respect, ségolène, definitively, city_center	Le Monde	1.2Frame-up against a potential presidential socialist candidate	9.14	up, frame, presidential, plot, primary, candidate, socialist, ps [Socialist Party acronym], candidacy, benefit, election, chance, trap, present, theory, survey, hollande, aubry, think, manoeuvre
2.8US judicial proceeding, speculations on the process and its outcome	10.26	jury, sentence, trial, decide, defence, big, charge, day, month, prosecutor, system, weak, liable to, process, holding, instruction, cumulative, accuse, guilty, prison	All	1.5Process and outcome of the trial, US judiciary system	16.83	guilty, sentence, plead, risk, innocence, unite, fact, prosecutor, France, proceeding, justice, American, defence, accuse, judicial, version, presumption, rape, accusation, case

IMF: International Monetary Fund.

All translations from French into English are ours.

@Leslie: Contrary to the French inquisitoire system, whereby the proceedings are presided over by an interrogating judge who indicts the defendant, who, after a long investigation oscillating between prosecution and defense, decides whether to take him/her to court, the US justice is founded on an adversarial system. (Le Monde, 15 May, 5.28 p.m.)³

This is an issue that is also significant in Corpus 1 (Category 1.5) in terms of message share (16.83% of submitted messages against 10.27% for Category 2.8) and in terms of similar lexical forms and discursive function, denoting a clear similarity between Corpus 1 and Corpus 2 and consequently, journalists’ awareness of the interest of these contributions.

Category 2.2 is essentially composed of links to articles that address the case. Although here again the category is close to the lexical universe found in Corpus 1 (1.8), there are many differences both in quantitative and qualitative terms. First, Category 1.8 concerns ‘only’ 4.65% of submitted messages, whereas Category 2.2 concerns 18.54%, that is, a significant share of messages. Then, the links in Corpus 1 take visitors to a wide range of sources (e.g. New York Times, New York Post, Le Parisien, Libération, Le Post, BFMTV, TF1, El País or Reuters), as illustrated in the following contribution:

The New York Times provides more detailed information on Strauss-Kahn’s assault and hasty departure from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/nyregion/imf-head-is-arrested-and-accused-of-sexual-attack.html?hp (Guillaume, 15 May 1.55 p.m.)

Unlike, the links in Corpus 2 take visitors to Le Monde and the NY Times. The following excerpt from Corpus 2 illustrates well the characteristics of this category, within which the main contributors are journalists:

An insight to be read on Le Monde.fr: An indictment that shattered the deal for the Socialist Party for 2012 http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2011/05/15/une-inculpation-qui-bouleverse-la-donne-au-ps-pour-2012_1522355_823448.html (Le Monde, 15 May 2.41 p.m.)

Thus, the promotion of material produced by the editorial board seems to be an imperative for journalists which is at least as important as the provision of a diversity of sources for Internet users to gather information on the case.

Category 2.1, which represents 13.7% of the corpus, is structured by the live tweet of journalists, who publish photographs from the courtroom and provide a live narrative of the trial, as evidenced in the following excerpt:

If you want to follow what is going on in Harlem for #DSK in real time, follow @daftkurt http://twitter.com/daftkurt, AFP correspondent on premises. [via Twitter]. (Guillaume Daudin, journalist, 15 May, 7:37 p.m.)

This category, whose contributors are exclusively media professionals, does not logically have any equivalent in Corpus 1. The exclusive and live information to which this category is related to constitutes one of the journalistic added-values of the Live Blog platform.

Category 2.7 (8.03% of the corpus) is structured around the socialist primary elections in the run-up to the French presidential elections and around the impact of the case on French political life, as illustrated in the following excerpt:

On the French Socialist Party side, reactions suggest caution. Ségolène Royal talks about ‘upsetting information which still needs to be fully verified’. The primary socialist elections candidate says she does not want to ‘transform this event into a political saga’. (Le Monde, 15 May, 10:36 a.m.)

Addressed by Le Monde.fr journalists rather than by Internet users, this category is close to Category 1.2 whose size is comparable, that is, the one focused on the hypothesis of a ‘frame-up’ against a potential presidential candidate in France and on the consequences of the case on French political life. The following unpublished contribution is typical of this lexical universe:

Could it be a manoeuvring geared towards weakening a potential candidate for the Socialist Primary and the presidential elections, or an attack against the outgoing IMF President, already blamed for his loose morals? (Louis, 15 May, 7.45 a.m.)

Nevertheless, any reference to a trap or a plot omnipresent in Corpus 1 seems sidelined in Corpus 2 for the benefit of political declarations and the consequences of the case. Therefore, it seems that Le Monde.fr journalists control messages according to their content (depending on whether messages are questionable or not) – and perhaps also on the basis of a certain representation of the Internet audience. Moreover, Le Monde.fr journalists add in this category their own discourse within a media ‘horse race framing’ (Iyengar, 1991), that is to say, proposing prognostics and prospective analyses on the elections, largely on the basis of opinion polls.

Category 2.6 represents 7.67% of the corpus and is also significantly the doing of Le Monde.fr journalists. It approaches the consequences of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for the IMF, on its management and on the international economic and financial agenda, as evidenced in the following excerpt:

Right now, there is no obligation for the IMF to take a decision and it can function without a boss, while more information on the case becomes available. The First deputy Managing Director, the American John Lipsky, can take the lead. (Le Monde, 15 May, 1.28 p.m.)

Category 2.6 can be compared to Category 1.3 which has more weight (18.55% of the corpus) and which includes contributions lamenting the consequences of the case on French and international political life, like in the following unpublished contribution:

A gold mine for Sarkozy, isn’t it? It is too early to speak out but one can hardly imagine this scenario from a man about to become president … Investigative journalists will have the time of their life! (JFC, 15 May, 7.48 a.m.)

However, Category 1.3 is marked by an explicit controversial tone, through several reactions from political personalities and, at times, through the questioning of the media coverage of the case. Category 2.6, by contrast, seems more uncluttered and remains circumscribed with regard to the question of the consequences on world finances and the IMF. Thus, in Corpus 2, the writing form is more constrained and, to a certain extent, erases the ‘opinion columns’ style that can be found in the messages of Corpus 1. The object of the discourse among Corpus 2 messages is also more narrowly focused than among those of Corpus 1.

Category 2.5 (13.93% of the corpus) is constituted by hypotheses on the US judge’s decision at the preliminary hearing and is associated, according to contributors, with notions such as reputation and the influence on the judge’s decision of the ‘media echo’ of the case on the American continent. This is the only category that Internet users significantly contribute to, along the lines of the following excerpt:

The judge who must determine the immediate future of Strauss-Kahn is named Abraham Clott. He has about 60 years of service and has been practicing at New York Crim Court since 2004. He is also the one who has the responsibility to establish the amount of the bail. (J. Edouard, 16 May, 00.56 a.m.)

This Corpus 2.2 category clearly corresponds to Category 1.6, whose message share stands at 15.21% of the corpus and whose lexical identity (see the most significative forms in Table 1) is extremely close, both being motivated by interrogations and speculations on the judge’s decision after the preliminary hearing. Thus, the journalists in charge of the Live Blog have (albeit not in a clear-cut way) granted Internet users the discursive role of voicing people’s fears and interrogations related to the trial.

Category 2.4 (9.33% of the corpus) is structured by the narratives of various facts in relation to what took place at the hotel, configured through different versions and depositions (prosecution, defence, police, etc.) as evidenced in the following excerpt:

At the moment, we do not have information on this point. The police from New York believe that Strauss-Kahn may have left the Manhattan Sofitel in a precipitated manner, since he left his mobile and other belongings in his room. (Le Monde, 15 May, 10.44 a.m.)

Addressed equally by both amateur Internet users and Le Monde.fr journalists, this category seems to constitute a kind of synthesis of two categories of Corpus 1 that are highly polarized: on one hand, Internet users’ speculations on the nature of events that took place at the hotel and the questioning of the accusations made by Nafissatou Diallo (Category 1.4, 12.14% of Corpus 1) and, on the other hand, the circumstances of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest as he was going to the airport and the reference to a possible escape attempt accrediting his guilt (Category 1.1, 20.02% of Corpus 1).

The following contributions are characteristic of Categories 1.4 and 1.1, respectively:

How is it possible for a ‘maid’ to come into the room of the IMF President with complete freedom? There is no security guard? No security at the SOFITEL? If the story is true of course. (Category 1.4, Antoine, 15 May, 7.19 p.m.)

Strauss-Kahn’s relatives state that at the presumed time of the assault, he was having lunch with his daughter Camille. The defense has already announced material evidence and testimonies that establish Strauss-Kahn’s innocence. (Category 1.1, Jean-Paul de Perth, 16 May, 1.18 p.m.)

The fact that, in Corpus 2, these two aspects are here gathered within a common lexical universe, focused on the events witnessed and reported in the different depositions, explicitly denotes a journalistic endeavour to propose a balanced treatment of what constitutes an ‘uncertain event’, in the sense of Pilmis (2014). What seems to be at stake for journalists here is to avoid the pitfall of treating information in a way that is either too lenient with Strauss-Kahn or, on the contrary, that takes the plaintiff’s allegations for granted.

Finally, Category 2.3 (18.54% of the corpus) focuses on the narrative of detention and on the interview between Strauss-Kahn and his lawyer at the Court police precinct to prepare his defence. The following excerpt illustrates well this type of discourse:

According to the France Info correspondent in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is still at Harlem police precinct. Many journalists are amassing in front of the building where a security line has been settled. (Le Monde, 15 May, 5.27 p.m.)

Within this category, which is dealt with by Le Monde.fr journalists, the discourse of Internet users on the circumstances of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest significantly resorts to both a lexicon of narratives and a lexicon that questions the US judicial proceedings, the preliminary enquiry and its potential outcome. These two lexica belong to Categories 1.1 and 1.6. The emphasis is placed on the narrative of the interview between Strauss-Kahn and his lawyer, the construction of which is fed into by real-time information inputs on the development of the trial (rather than on controversial issues, already referred to). Here again, the concern for an appeased journalistic treatment which is based on facts seems to prevail, in accordance with Le Monde journalism ethics.

Analysis of Internet users’ types of contributions to the Live Blog

Among the Internet users willing to have a voice in the Live Blog media space, four types of positionings seem to appear:

Questioning facts and events (Categories 1.1, 1.4 and 1.6);

Speculations and hypotheses regarding the grounds of the Strauss-Kahn case and its possible consequences (Categories 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 and 1.6);

A ‘meta’-discourse on the Live Blog platform, its functioning and its rules;

Sharing illustrative, enriching and informative links related to the unfolding of events.

To refine the analysis of laypersons’ voices in the media space, Corpus 1 has been divided into three sets of data corresponding to different types of contributions as identified in earlier work on participatory journalism (Pignard-Cheynel and Noblet, 2010; Pignard-Cheynel and Sebbah, 2014). The first set comprises questions or requests for information and/or explanations in relation to the facts of the events and the case, and their possible consequences. These questions are generally asked in a neutral tone and call for very concise and brief answers. The second data set includes personal statements, opinions and comments, in addition to all forms of speculation and hypotheses put forward by Internet users. This set includes a high proportion of messages that evoke, question and fuel conspiracy theories. Finally, the third set is made up of Internet users’ contributions of information and the sharing of links and sources, be they spontaneous or in response to other contributors.

It is worth noting that while the majority of contributions from Internet users are focused on the case itself and on related facts, some others comment, question or even criticize the Live Blog platform (in a meta-discursive form) or more generally the media coverage of the case. Last but not least, some contributions have been suppressed from the corpus because they were incomplete or incomprehensible (truncated sentences, interjections, etc.), making their characterization impossible.

Each message has been manually classified into one of the three contribution types. This was a necessary task given the extent to which human interpretation is central to appreciate what relates to a personal question, comment or an information input. This is particularly the case when the data (like Corpus 1, made of all submitted messages) are ‘raw’ and include many drosses (lack of punctuation, particularly question marks, spelling mistakes, abbreviations, etc.). This manual identification was realized on a sub-corpus of 8175 messages only, that is, those submitted during the first 24 hours of the live blogging process. Messages were classified and distributed as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Distribution of messages among the different types of contribution.

This distribution casts light onto the incentives for laypersons’ participation on information websites. It also puts into perspective the salience of comments (slightly above one-third of the corpus) which are supplanted only by questions addressed to journalists (half of the Internet users’ contributions). However, information inputs remain few (11%), as also found in earlier studies such as Aubert’s (2008).

This sub-corpus was then subject to a divisive hierarchical cluster analysis, leading to the establishment of six categories (see Table 2), which overlap to a great extent with those arising from the analysis of the larger corpus, as detailed in Table 1.

Table 2.

Table of categories identified by the hierarchical top-down method on the sub-corpus of messages submitted during the first 24 hours of the live blogging process.

Category	% of corpus	Type of contribution	Name of the category	The 20 most significative forms
A	33.94	COMMENT	PLOT AND CONSPIRACY THEORY	frame-up/plot/politics or political/case/plot/candidate/presidential/think/story/man/manoeuvre/french/trap/too much/left/sexual/act/life/benefit/ps (for socialist party)
B	18.42	QUESTION	ACCUSATIONS/QUESTIONING OF THE EVENTS AT THE HOTEL	room/woman/hotel/cleaning/body/sofitel/customer/get in/come in/security/guard/suite/shower/employee/telephone/occupy/mobile/hotel/bath/naked
C	18	QUESTION	ARREST, DETENTION AND CHARGES	hour/police station/new/york/court/flight/place/hearing/harlem/test/tweet/ny/arrest/bet/pinet/arrest/evening/police/place/appearance
D	8.09	UNDEFINED	POLITICAL REACTIONS	reaction/express/react/elysée/sarkozy/comment/nicolas/obama/publish/lipsky/statement/crisis/john/resignation/debt/communiqué/subject/lire/euro/government
E	16.6	QUESTION	JUDICIAL PROCEEDING	risk/guilty/bail/proceeding/immunity/sentence/trial/plead/diplomatic/judiciary/prison/time/united states/risk/indictment/indict/last/fact/system/USA
F	4.96	INFORMATION	LINKS TOWARDS ARTICLES AND VIDEOS	http/www/html/video/wat/11423_2hccx_/com/tv/ardisson/the/banon/tristane/fr/and/he/that/is/from/of/was

Some trends become apparent when comparing the three types of contributions from Internet users and the six categories produced by the top-down hierarchical method. Each category corresponds to a main (or even single) type of contribution. Only Category D, which corresponds to political reactions, cannot be clearly identified with a specific type of contribution, as none of them appear dominant.

Logically, the category corresponding to the sharing of links connected to articles on information sites or social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) is related to the information input-type of contribution (Category F). Similarly, the category which corresponds to a conspirational positioning (Category A) is illustrated by an omnipresence of the comment-type contribution (which does not appear significantly in any other category) at the expense of the other types of contribution. As for the question-type contribution, it is manifest under the other categories but in a more nuanced way: it is the most present under Category E (judicial proceeding) and to a lesser extent under Categories B and C (accusations and questioning of the events unfolding at the hotel; arrest, detention and charges). Thus, the question type specifically revolves around the unfolding, the verification and the consequences of events.

Discussion

This study proposed to enquire about the ways in which Internet users mobilize Live Blogs in co-constructing information ‘in real time’, on one hand, and about how journalists deal with this immediate and proliferating Internet-based participation, on the other hand. The analysis of Corpus 1 and Corpus 2 has allowed for re-exploring live blogging phenomena at the intersection between the editorial promise of a live, fully participatory artefact and the actual participation controlled by journalists, and in so doing, it has uncovered the concealed and all the more significant nature of Internet users’ actual participation.

This study involved facing the challenge of capturing the frontier between amateur and professional information production, as well as between information producers and consumers, on the web. Bruns’ (2010) notion of ‘produser’ underlines the weight of professional norms and of the representation of laypersons’ contributions, as apprehended and constructed by the journalists. In fact, in the end, it is always the journalist who holds the liberty and thus the responsibility to publicize and to weave Internet users’ participation into a narrative. For a reflection upon live blogging framing processes, there are several key elements that arise from the results of this study regarding the size of the corpus, the types of contribution and discourse themes favoured by Internet users and those selected by journalists.

With 20,339 contributions, the corpus reflects a strong impetus among readers and an undeniable interest among Internet users for online participation, as evidenced in the number of connections to the website throughout the live blogging process, amounting to 2.5 million. These abundant contributions construct a strong referential diversity in Corpus 1 (messages submitted to Le Monde.fr) displaying eight different categories of discourse and a wide range of framing possibilities.

As regards the types of contributions, the analysis reveals that the messages submitted by Internet users revolve around questions and interrogations at the expense of informative comments and inputs. This may be due to the sequential unfolding of events and to the gradual availability of reliable information which Internet users can share, interrogate and comment upon. Earlier studies had evidenced journalists’ overvaluing or, on the contrary, undervaluing of some types of contents while moderating (Author, 2014). Thus, journalists tend to select for publication those messages which raise questions or provide information and to ignore comments and opinion messages. The imbalanced distribution of the different types of contribution found when comparing Internet users’ submitted messages with actual published messages supports the hypothesis that journalists moderate messages according to their own professional criteria. In so doing, they shape the role of external contributors as one of increasing the media coverage value through complementary information or source inputs and one of intensifying readers’ adhesion by raising questions, in the same way that the interviewing journalists raise questions that they believe to be those of the audience. Thus, turning private messages into public messages has to do with a sort of ‘enunciative gatekeeping’ geared towards moderating the content of exchanges in accordance with the ethics and the deontology of Le Monde journalism.

As regards the discourse themes, the live and empirical moderation of messages seems to give a relatively faithful image of the contributions, to the extent that no category of discourse present in Corpus 1 (all submitted messages) seems to have disappeared from Corpus 2 (the published Live Blog) except for the category ‘meta’ which is hardly of interest to the public. This said, comments revolving around a conspiracy theory, as well as insulting, controversial or polarized messages, have not been published. Here, the mediation carried out by journalists seems to go beyond mere moderation tasks which tend to be minimal in the case, for example, of Internet users’ comments on articles of the website. Instead, the mediation involves a relatively strict editorial control, or filtering, in accordance with the identity of the media. In fact, journalists seem to frame, or more precisely to reframe, Internet-based contributions. For Gamson and Modigliani (1989),

Media discourse is part of the process by which individuals construct meaning, and public opinion is part of the process by which journalists and other cultural entrepreneurs develop and crystallize meaning in public discourse. (p. 2)

Thus, the Live Blog discourse seems to constitute such a ‘public discourse’ which crystallizes the interaction between journalists and their audience, whereby Internet users’ discourses and varying frames intersect with journalists’ interpretation of facts, sources and their audience.

Within this process of frame co-production, the relationship between journalists and Internet-based users is asymmetrical. In fact, journalists reframe amateur contributions by appending their own frames onto them. For Gamson (1992), indeed, media framing largely depends on the credit attributed to a source by the journalist at the moment of collecting the information. The media framing process is thus comparable to the process of journalists’ information collection on the ground, albeit with three differences: (a) instantaneity, since the timeframe for journalists’ mediation is highly reduced; (b) the blurring of sources and audiences as a result of the participatory nature of these media spaces or platforms; and (c) journalists’ ‘gatekeeping’ being not only enunciative (as in the case of reframing on-the-ground sources through journalistic rewriting) but also referential. This is because reframing is carried out by journalists exclusively through the management and publication of very short but numerous Internet users’ messages.

In this light, the Live Blog can be considered as a ‘document’ in itself, which is comparable to a long article, within which information units correspond to the published contributions. Posting 491 messages out of 766 messages published in the Live Blog, journalists occupy two-thirds of its editorial space. If there is a real injunction to participate,⁴ and an actual management and broadcasting of Internet users’ participation, the participatory nature of Live Blogs are ultimately subject to journalists’ live media framing work, which are guided by the principles that pertain to their press titles. At the same time, the editorial filtering process remains, most of the time, invisible to the audience, for whom the Live Blog is considered as a mere technical (and not a socio-technical) artefact, geared towards collecting and streaming all their comments. This gap between participatory tools users’ expectations and the editorial boards’ need to preserve their credibility and reputation, as underlined by Singer et al. (2011), is at the heart of the misunderstanding that sometimes arises between media and their audiences. This misunderstanding is also fuelled by the lack of an Internet users’ Charter as regards the use of the Live Blog. This leaves a space for contributors and journalists to experiment, confront and mutually reframe each other (the journalist must take into account the nature of the submitted comments and of the audience who will see their messages filtered) although these processes globally remain asymmetrical, in favour of journalists. This imbalance has been highlighted by previous research on the participative dimension of journalism. These studies, based on the discourse of journalists on their own practices, confirm that journalists remain gatekeepers. In the same line, this study strengthens this idea by taking into account observable participation in users’ comments (both published and unpublished). It enables to reconsider the question of the place of profane audience speech in new media, with a specific focus on an editorial format which precisely promises a strong participative dimension.

One of the keys to the success of press titles on the Internet rests upon the management of participation by allowing active communities of readers to emerge while reaffirming one’s editorial identity and demands, not only within their profession but also among their participating audience. The generalization of our results to any live blogging artefact in the media sparks an avenue for future research. The live blogging promise of participation and journalistic management of editorial place are key characteristics of this format. Live blogging in the media is a privileged ground not only for the researcher to observe and to analyse but also for the media to experiment new forms of the participation and to take into account the ways in which the audience uses evolve.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

Notes

Author biographies

Emmanuel Marty is an associate professor in the Journalism Department of the University Institute of Technology (IUT), Nice Sophia Antipolis University (UNS). His research, led within I3M laboratory, concerns new journalistic practices as well as media discourse and its analysis through lexicometrics, especially media frames and their interactions with public opinion and political issues.

Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel is an associate professor in Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Lorraine (France). She is a member of the Centre de recherche sur les mediations (CREM) research laboratory and the Observatory of Digital Journalism (Obsweb). Her research focuses on the digital strategies of media, the evolution of journalistic practices and the emergence of digital formats as well as innovative writings, such as live blogging and mobile journalism.

Brigitte Sebbah is an associate professor in Political Communication at the Paris Est Créteil University (UPEC) and a member of the CEDITEC research laboratory. Her research focuses on electoral political communication, ethics and morality in political communication, new media and innovative writings in journalism, journalistic practices, media publics and reception.

References

Aubert

(2008) Rue 89: un modèle horizontal de la production d’information? Mediamorphoses 24: 99–104.

Bardoel

Deuze

(2001) Network journalism: converging competences of media professionals and professionalism. Australian Journalism Review 23(2): 91–103.

Baumgartner

Mahoney

(2008) The two faces of framing: individual-level framing and collective issue definition in the European Union. European Union Politics 9(3): 435–449.

Bowman

Willis

(2003) We media: how audiences are shaping the future of news and information. The Media Center at the American Press Institute, July. Available at: http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf (accessed 3 February 2015).

Bruns

(2010) From reader to writer: citizen journalism as news produsage. In: Hunsinger

Klastrup

Allen

(eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 119–133.

Domingo

(2008) Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: dealing with an uncomfortable myth. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(3): 680–704.

Entman

(1993) Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication 43(4): 51–58.

Gamson

(1992) Talking Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gamson

Modigliani

(1989) Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: a constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology 95(1): 1–38.

10.

Giles

Shaw

(2009) The psychology of news influence and the development of media framing analysis. Social & Personality Psychology Compass 3(4): 375–393.

11.

Gillmor

(2004) We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

12.

Iyengar

(1991) Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

13.

Jarvis

(2006) Networked journalism. BuzzMachine, 5 July. Available at: http://buzzmachine.com/2006/07/05/networked-journalism (accessed 3 February 2015).

14.

Jenkins

(2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York; London: New York University Press.

15.

Knight

(1921) Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. New York: Harper.

16.

Lebart

Salem

(1994) Statistique Textuelle. Paris: Dunod.

17.

McDougall

(2011) The journalistic identities of liveblogging. A case study: reporting the 2009 post-election protests in Iran. Media@LSE. Available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/2010/2nd/McDougall.pdf

18.

Marchand

(2007) Concepts, méthodes, outils. In: Gauzente

Peyrat-Guillard

(eds) Analyse statistique de données textuelles en sciences de gestion. Cormelles le Royal: EMS Éditions, pp. 47–70.

19.

Matthes

Kohring

(2008) The content analysis of media frames: toward improving reliability and validity. Journal of Communication 58: 258–279.

20.

Pignard-Cheynel

Noblet

(2010) L’encadrement des contributions ‘amateurs’ au sein des sites d’information: entre impératifs participatifs et exigences journalistiques. In: Millerand

Proulx

Rueff

(eds) Web Social Mutation de la Communication. Québec city, QC, Canada: Presses de l’université du Québec, pp. 265–282.

21.

Pignard-Cheynel

Sebbah

(2014) Le live, expression d’une information ‘en train de se faire’. L’exemple de la couverture de l’affaire DSK par lemonde.fr. Recherches en Communication 40: 13–25.

22.

Pilmis

(2014) Produire en urgence. La gestion de l’imprévisible dans le monde du journalisme. Revue française de sociologie 1 (55): 101–126.

23.

Ratinaud

Déjean

(2009) IRaMuTeQ : implémentation de la méthode ALCESTE d’analyse de texte dans un logiciel libre. Modélisation Appliquée aux Sciences Humaines et Sociales (MASHS2009). Toulouse - Le Mirail.

24.

Reinert

(1983) Une méthode de classification descendante hiérarchique: application à l’analyse lexicale par context. Les cahiers de l’analyse des données 8(2): 187–198.

25.

Reinert

(2008) Mondes lexicaux stabilisés et analyse statistique de discours. In: JADT 2008: 9es Journées internationales d’Analyse statistique des Données Textuelles. Lyon, 12–14 March, pp. 981–993. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.

26.

Rosen

(2006) The people formerly known as the audience. PressThink, 27 June. Available at: http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html (accessed 3 February 2015).

27.

Singer

Hermida

Domingo

et al . (2011) Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

28.

Steensen

2012) Conversing the fans: ‘coveritlive’ and the social function of journalism. In: Roksvold

Krøvel

(eds) We Love to Hate Each Other: Mediated Football Fan Culture. Gothenburg: Nordicom, pp. 207–228.

29.