Abstract
Previous research has been critical of mainstream media’s attempts at blogging, with studies finding that journalists are maintaining their traditional gatekeeper function and failing to engage with readers. This study examines the work of 13 journalists who have political blogs on Australian mainstream newspaper websites, with data gathered from a content analysis of comment-threads as well as interviews. Surprisingly, the results show that most of these journalists are engaging with readers, and some have been doing so since July 2006. They regard such participation as an essential part of their blogging practice, and see their role as not only moderators but also facilitators of discussion. These results contrast with overseas studies which show there is a ‘minimalist’ view of participation that dominates in journalistic organisations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.
Keywords
Introduction
The greatest challenge presented by new media has been to one of traditional journalism’s weakest points – its lack of personal contact with readers (Regan, 2003). Traditionally, the role of a journalist was predominantly that of a gatekeeper – to gather, filter, edit and publish the news (Hermida, 2011) – and their engagement with users has been very limited, via readers’ letters and talkback radio, for example. However, the use of blogs (and the micro-blog Twitter) is providing an opportunity for journalists to interact with audiences and offers a chance for them to achieve greater accountability and transparency, democratise news production processes (Matheson, 2004) and reinvigorate civic engagement (Coleman and Wright, 2008; Lowrey, 2006; Robinson, 2006). This signifies a profound shift from decades of ‘traditional journalism as a lecture’ – in which the journalist decides what is ‘news’ and where citizens are passive bystanders – to ‘journalism-as-a-conversation’ in which citizens can be active participants (Marchionni, 2013: 131). And yet scholars argue that traditional media have failed to take advantage of the blog format in that they are normalising blogs by maintaining a traditional gatekeeper function (Hermida, 2010a) and because most journalists fail to interact with readers (Domingo, 2008; Manosevitch and Walker, 2009). Their motives in the adoption of blogs are regarded as primarily commercial, as they ‘may be more interested in containing and directing the blogging phenomenon than in fostering democratic participation’ (Lowrey, 2006: 493).
This study looks at the work of journalists who have political blogs on Australian mainstream newspaper sites. This was part of a wider project with the objective to determine the value of Australian journalist-blogs and the extent to which they may be a new deliberative or political information space (see Garden, 2014). A mixed-methods approach was used, with traditional content analysis adapted in order to evaluate conversations on comment-threads and interviews with journalists undertaken to gauge their views on blogging, their motives in authoring blogs and to gain insights ‘into the impact of digital technologies on journalistic practices’ (Hermida, 2009: 12).
Blogs and the public sphere
Although there are estimated to be millions of blogs, and many of these function as personal diaries, blogs focusing on politics and current affairs have been of particular interest to scholars across a range of disciplines (including politics, media, journalism and communication). Scholars have often resorted to the notion of the public sphere to conceptualise the implications of political blogs for public dialogue and their potential to reinvigorate civic engagement (Mummery and Rodan, 2013; Reese et al., 2007; Singer, 2005). Barlow (2010) suggests there is an opportunity for journalists to facilitate democratic and deliberative dialogue in a way in which citizen-blogs have perhaps failed due to inefficient gatekeeping. What is often overlooked is that even before the Internet there was a trend in news organisations towards more engagement of citizens. This was the phenomenon of public journalism which began in the United States in the late 1980s and lasted about 10 years (Schudson, 1999). News organisations began experimenting with town-hall-style meetings and other initiatives that brought journalists and citizens together. Their aim was to create ‘a vibrant, participatory democracy’ or a public deliberative conversation (Ryfe and Mensing, 2010: 39). By 2002, there had been about 600 experiments where journalists interacted with citizens (in televised deliberations or newspapers organising citizen roundtables). Although some of these efforts failed, research showed civic life benefited in communities where a news organisation practised public journalism (Haas, 2007). A number of scholars believe that modern journalism appears ‘ripe’ for the re-application of some of its principles, namely, the involvement and engagement of citizens (Rosenberry and St. John, 2010b). Indeed, Nip (2006) describes the attempts of mainstream news organisations to engage individuals as citizens (on blogs, for example) as the second phase of public journalism.
It must be noted that in spite of decreases in newspaper circulation in many developed countries, the national press retains a central influence. Greenslade (2011) contends that in spite of falling sales, the national press retains an influence over the totality of the media agenda and ‘papers still command the nation’s central political narrative’. This is evidenced by the way broadcasters and bloggers respond to stories in the national press; the material that appears in current affairs programmes is usually based on follow-ups to such stories. Furthermore, Habermas (2006) argues that even in online debates, political communication is promoted only when ‘news groups crystallize around the focal points of the quality press’ (p. 423).
Surprisingly, the vast majority of studies of even independent blogs have analysed posts of bloggers or the interlinking between blogs (Habegger, 2011; Herring et al., 2005; Kelly, 2008; Kenix, 2009) and overlooked the comment-thread, arguably the important component of a blog. There has been a paucity of studies of mainstream media blogs (including Australian ones) and these have been largely quantitative in that they have analysed links and number of comments from readers or bloggers. Overall, they have found a lack of interactivity between journalists and commenters (see Dailey et al., 2008; Singer, 2005, 2009; Wall, 2005). However, the results of the author’s study (Garden, 2010) were more positive, with several of The Australian’s blogs outshining their alternative counterparts in terms of popularity and blogger–audience interactivity. This may be due in part to the fact that the state of journalism varies greatly in different countries, and national, political and economic contexts differ (Witschge, 2011).
In spite of the dearth of studies of mainstream media blogs, they are widely criticised and dismissed. According to Deuze et al. (2007), an ‘interactive, dialogical or participatory style’ is still ‘under construction’. Bahnisch (2007) says with a few exceptions, ‘what is being practiced [sic] in that place [News Limited] is not really blogging’ because of editorial control and influence; the difference in language, tone and style, and a lack of engagement between blogger and commenters. Highfield and Bruns (2012) claim that Australian mainstream media fail to take advantage of the affordances of the blog format, such as providing further links and responding to readers’ comments (p. 93). And in his recent book, The Rise of the Fifth Estate: Social Media and Blogging in Australian Politics, Greg Jericho (2012) argues that the blog of the late Matt Price on The Australian was the only kind of writing that ‘deserved the name of a “blog” on a mainstream media website by a journalist’ (p. 8).
In recent years, the focus of research on participatory journalism has been on comments on articles, the most popular form of user-generated content (UGC) on mainstream news sites (Ruiz et al., 2011), and blogs have been comparatively overlooked. Comments to online articles are a quite different space to blogs for two reasons. First, there is much less likelihood of deliberative discussion occurring or a sense of community emerging because journalists seldom engage in the discussion. Second, moderation is usually done by in-house moderators or out-sourced to moderation firms. There needs to be a renewed focus on mainstream media blogs, and in particular the political discussion that occurs on comment-threads. Considering that the press remains the most influential medium, this is a major gap in the literature which the current study addresses.
Method
The aim of the study was to determine whether the uptake of blogs was mere window dressing – to attract audiences and boost revenue – or if it reflects a second and more promising phase of public journalism. The research questions were as follows:
RQ1. To what extent are Australian mainstream news sites adopting blogs, and in particular political blogs?
RQ2. Does the adoption of the blog format by Australian news sites represent a fundamental change in relationships with audiences?
A mixed-methods research approach was used, which is a ‘design for collecting, analysing and mixing both quantitative and qualitative data in a study in order to understand a research problem’ (Clark et al., 2008: 363). Although quantitative and qualitative methods are often considered ‘antithetic or divergent’ they are not mutually exclusive, and their combination can be beneficial as they focus on the ‘different dimensions of the same phenomenon’ (Das, 1983: 311). Two research techniques were used: content analysis and interviews, and this combination of approaches – one to collect quantitative data and the other to collect qualitative data – can ‘achieve triangulation, and provide greater validity of findings’ (Jankowski and Van Selm, 2008: 8). In this study, the content analysis preceded interviews, with the initial results of this analysis informing the secondary qualitative data collection from the interviews, a design known as a ‘sequential explanatory design’ (Creswell, 2009: 209). Content analysis was used to analyse websites in order to identify political journalist-blogs and to analyse selected comment-threads of these blogs. Internet-mediated communication such as websites lend themselves to content analysis and not surprisingly it was one of the first methodologies adapted to analyse online content and has been used increasingly since. In particular, blog conversations as naturally occurring, non-reactive online reactions or responses are rich sources of data for such analysis (Herring, 2010).
For this study, it was decided to concentrate on the political journalist-blogs (if any) associated with the websites of the metropolitan and national daily press – News Limited,
1
Fairfax Media and The West Australian. A cursory inspection of the websites of regional papers indicated there were no political blogs, and Jericho (2012) found none in his recent mapping of the Australian political blogosphere. A blog had to follow the definition:
A frequently updated website that uses blog software (such as WordPress.com) or is called a blog by the author(s) or the news site. It has dated entries of commentary – or other material such as graphics – displayed in reverse chronological sequence, and there is a facility for readers to add comments to each entry or post. (Garden, 2014: 53–54)
Although there is an ongoing debate over whether blogs should be regarded as a genre or a medium (see Garden, 2012), they are conceptualised here as a medium, although there needs to be a differentiation ‘between kinds – genres – of blogs that are in use in various social contexts’ (Lüders et al., 2010: 952). Of interest for this study is the genre of political blogs, which are blogs in which a significant amount of content posted by the blogger relates to politics and political issues (Hargittai et al., 2008: 72). Although the term political can merely refer to ‘governing or campaigning for public office’ (Singer, 2005: 182), it is used here in its broader sense to also include pertaining to civic affairs – those ‘issues of significance to civic or community life’ (Singer, 2005: 182). There are no clear and precise benchmarks as to the proportion of content relating to political issues needed in order for a blog to be considered a political blog, which means that categorising blogs as political relies heavily on judgement calls. (Note, for the purposes of this study only blogs which focused on national political issues, rather than state or local issues, were selected.)
Although the boundaries between professional/amateur and journalist/non-journalist are becoming blurred, for the purposes of this study a journalist is defined as someone employed by a news organisation, a definition used in a number of other studies (Hanitzsch et al., 2010; Weaver et al., 2006). Shoemaker et al. (2009) locate the definition of a journalist ‘squarely with the professionals working within news organisations’ (p. 77). A journalist-blogger, therefore, is a journalist employed by a news organisation where all or part of their work is to maintain a blog. The journalist may be a freelancer or a professional journalist who blogs as part of their journalism practice. This excludes politicians and other outside contributors who may author blogs on mainstream news sites. In contrast, citizen-blogs refer to blogs produced independently of such organisations, whether authored by professional journalists, freelance journalists, academics, politicians, or other members of the public (Garden, 2014: 54). A distinction was made between a political blog authored by a journalist and a political blog by a so-called political journalist (or columnist). My interest here is the former group, of which the latter is a part.
The identification process took place in December 2011. A total of 19 sites 2 were examined, including those of national and metropolitan newspapers as well as the stand-alone sites The Punch, National Times and Brisbane Times. After the political journalist-blogs were identified, selected comment-threads were analysed. These were in response to posts on the asylum seeker issue because it appeared to be the only issue which all the journalist-bloggers had recently posted about. Furthermore, it was a ‘hot’ political topic in Australia in 2011 and, as Richardson and Stanyer (2011) note, ‘immigration and racial or religious difference’ can produce the ‘richest argumentative data’ (p. 986). Due to time and financial constraints, only one comment-thread from each of the 13 blogs was examined, which is a limitation as a journalist may engage on some comment-threads and not others.
Although there was a range of indicators measured in the wider study, here the focus is on the interactivity of the journalists. Interactivity means that participants engage with one another; before a process can be judged deliberative, there must be ‘uptake and engagement – other people must hear or read, internalise and respond’ (Goodin, 2000: 91). This was measured by counting the number of responses, and the word volume of each. In addition, those who were dominators were identified. In deliberation, ideally each person should be able to participate on an equal footing with every other participant and no-one should dominate the conversation or silence others (Blom et al., 2011; Koop and Jansen, 2009). While there is not a standard definition in the literature for designating certain commenters as dominators, following Blom et al. (2011) and Ruiz et al. (2011) who defined dominators as those who contributed respectively more than six or seven comments on each thread. Note that as the focus of the study was on the quality of conversation occurring on the comment-thread, the original posts of the journalists were not coded or analysed.
The second technique was interviews in order to gauge journalists’ views and perspectives on blogging. These took place between 24 March 2012 and 27 May 2012. Interviewing is a widely used method for collecting qualitative data, because the ‘best way to find out what the people think about something is to ask them’ (Bower in Jensen, 2002: 240). They are a useful and valuable form of data collection as they are flexible and allow for the development of an ‘understanding of the perspectives of the interviewees’ (Daymon and Holloway, 2002: 221). Kvale (1983) describes their purpose being to ‘gather descriptions of the life-world of the interviewee with respect to interpretation of the meaning of the described phenomena’ (p. 174). Journalists were given the option to be interviewed face-to-face, by phone or by email. Most were interviewed by phone, although all had subsequent contact with the author by email or Twitter to answer follow-up questions or to clarify ambiguities.
Results and discussion
Overall, as of 1 December 2011, 114 active blogs were found, with 41 blogs on News Limited sites and 73 on Fairfax Media sites. (No blogs were located on Seven West Media’s The West Australian.) Of these 114 blogs, 26 were identified as political. Five of these were authored by outside contributors such as politicians, and eight dealt predominantly with local or state issues, such as Pineapple Politics 3 described as a guide ‘through the political jungle and pineapple field that is Queensland’. Only 13 dealt predominantly with national political issues, and 12 were on News Limited sites. Surprisingly, Blunt Instrument was the sole Fairfax Media blog, although two new Fairfax Media political blogs – Question Time and The Pulse – commenced in February 2012, which meant that they fell out of the time frame for the content analysis. These 13 political journalist-blogs are listed in Table 1, which also gives the names of the journalist, the date they started blogging and the news site which hosts their blog. Note that the Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph are considered to be tabloid (popular) sites, whereas Fairfax’s National Times and The Australian are considered broadsheet (quality) news sites. While traditionally tabloid and broadsheet refer to the format of the print newspaper, with the latter the mark of more serious, less sensational print journalism, they also refer to a style of journalism (Cross, 2014). Although The Australian newspaper still retains a broadsheet format, Fairfax papers recently moved to a more compact design, although are still considered quality newspapers.
Political blogs on mainstream media sites (1 December 2011).
Megalogenis resigned from The Australian in November 2012.
As can be seen in Table 1, the first Australian news site to embrace political blogs was The Daily Telegraph, which introduced them in mid-2006, followed by Andrew Bolt’s blog on the Herald Sun 2 weeks later. According to Joe Hildebrand (14 May 2012, personal communication), it was ‘under the very enlightened and forward-thinking editorship’ of David Penberthy that their blogging system was created: ‘Penbo [Penberthy] promoted the blogs very heavily and was integral to shifting the paper’s focus to online’. Not surprisingly, 5 of the 13 blogs active as of December 2011 were on The Daily Telegraph. Note that after 26 years as a News Limited journalist, Megalogenis announced in early November 2012 (6 months after my interview with him) that he was leaving to work on other pursuits. This meant Meganomics would close.
These 13 blogs are only a small percentage of the total blogs in the overall Australian political blogosphere, which Jericho (2012a) identified as 324 overall, although undoubtedly a few (for example, those of Jack the Insider, Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair) have more influence than some of their alternative counterparts (Garden, 2014). Jonathan Green (2012), former editor of ABC’s The Drum, describes Andrew Bolt’s blog as ‘without doubt one of the most popular, robust, vigorous and influential spaces for discussion around politics’ and routinely clocks in the vicinity of 3 million page impressions a month.
Nine of the journalist-bloggers were already employed as journalists before they took up blogging. The other four were freelance journalists, three of whom – John Birmingham, Peter Brent and Tim Blair – were independent bloggers before they were recruited as bloggers on The Australian and The Daily Telegraph, respectively. Blair was one of Australia’s first bloggers and was once described as the ‘top dog among the new Australian digerati’ (Delaney, 2004). Brent (2009) was one of the first psepho-bloggers in Australia and started Mumble in 2001 as a website, which morphed into a blog at the end of June 2009. In July 2010, Mumble moved to The Australian Brent (2010). Birmingham began Blunt Instrument in September 2009, although his own independent blog Cheeseburger Gothic began in May 2005. The fourth freelance journalist, Peter Hoysted, who uses the nom de plume of Jack the Insider, had no experience of blogging until he began Jack the Insider in late 2007 as part of the promotion of his book The Insiders’ Guide to Power in Australia. Of the 13 journalist-bloggers, nine agreed to be interviewed. Seven were interviewed by telephone and two via email. Regardless, for the four journalists not interviewed, some data were obtained about their blogging practice from either comments they made on their blogs or information that had been published elsewhere.
Following the identification of the blogs, a sample of comment-threads were content-analysed, according to a range of indicators such as equality or inclusiveness, interactivity, disagreement and agreement, flaming, respect, level of justification and so forth, and both audience comments and blogger responses were coded. For this article, the results for blogger-interactivity are provided and discussed.
Table 2 shows a wide variation across the 13 threads ranging from 17 comments and blogger responses on Simon Benson to 500 on Jack the Insider – more than double that of any other of the sampled threads and not atypical for this popular blog. On the comment-thread analysed, four journalist-bloggers did not engage at all with their readers and three made less than five comments. (Miranda Devine does occasionally engage with readers on other threads, whereas the other three no longer engage at all.) Five of the journalist-bloggers were very interactive: Susie O’Brien, Jack the Insider, George Megalogenis, Chris Kenny and Peter Brent. In addition, the total word count of the more engaged bloggers is surprising, considering that they had already written substantial posts on the asylum seeker issue, with Jack the Insider writing 2753 words, and Chris Kenny 1485. The high interactivity of the bloggers at The Australian may be partly due to differences in the website’s design and affordances as it uses a version of Expression Engine which does not enable commenters to reply directly to each other, but makes it easier to reply directly to the blogger, who in turn can reply to them. On the Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph, the software enables commenters to reply either direct to the blogger or respond directly to another commenter by hitting ‘Reply’ underneath a particular comment, which creates sub-threads.
Blogger engagement.
Six journalist-bloggers contributed six or more comments so can be considered to be dominators. Jack the Insider responded 90 times, which is 18 per cent of the total comments on that thread. The question arises as to the real value of such engagement as this may simply represent journalists dominating and controlling the conversation. Several studies of online seminars have found that peer-led debate where there is low or zero participation by a tutor or instructor is more productive of higher level discussion than tutor-led debate (Robertson and Lee, 2007; Schrire, 2006). Yet there is also a strong case for the journalist to be present. Marchionni (2013) argues that merely offering citizens an opportunity to engage and chat among themselves on blogs is insufficient, as citizens need to feel journalists are listening and doing something with their responses, otherwise, ‘conversation becomes a phantom construct on this crucial dimension’ (p. 141).
The findings contrast to overseas studies which have found a distinct lack of interactivity between journalist-bloggers and commenters (Besselink, 2011; Dailey et al., 2008; Domingo, 2008; Manosevitch and Walker, 2009; Robinson, 2011; Witschge, 2011). In their study of blogs on US newspaper sites, Dailey et al. (2008) found 80 per cent of the journalists did not respond to readers, and the number of responses of the 13 journalists who engaged ranged from 1 to 12, with an average of 1.6 (N.B. some had more than one post and comment-thread). In contrast, in my study, which looked at only one post, the average response was 12.76, although this is skewed because of the five journalists who responded a lot. Jericho (2012) claims that before Twitter, Australian journalists were ‘essentially divorced from their readers’ except for letters to the editor and that even on blogs most journalists were ‘absent’ from discussions (p. 190). These results show most of these journalist-bloggers are engaging with readers and making themselves available. An inspection of their blog archives reveals some have been engaging with readers since July 2006 – well before the first wave of Australian journalists joined Twitter, which was in early 2009.
These results seem to counter the widespread notion that interactivity is ‘counterintuitive with the principles of traditional journalistic cultures’ as this culture makes them ‘perceive audience participation as a problem to manage rather than a benefit for the news product’ (Domingo, 2008: 698). The journalists who were interviewed were asked questions about their blogging practices and in particular their view towards interacting with readers. Even those journalists who have minimal or no interaction with readers still read (and moderate) the comments and find value in this. Andrew Bolt (24 March 2012, personal communication) said he reads many of the comments and gets ‘excellent tips there’. Although in the thread analysed, Miranda Devine made no response, she occasionally does on others. However, she told me that if people want a reply they usually communicate with her via email, and regards comments on the blog as being public and generally do not need a response (Miranda Devine, 10 May 2012, personal communication). She sees her blog as a good place for her to add posts on things that take her interest in between columns, and to get feedback that can offer her fresh perspectives and new information that helps inform her opinion.
In contrast, most of the journalists regarded their blogs as quite distinct from columns with comments and saw the key difference being the ‘conversational component’ of blogs that involves the author. Jack the Insider regards his blog as an opportunity to have a conversation about a particular issue and allow a bit of interactivity on all sides: the ‘trick is to engage with people and take the time to converse with them’. George Megalogenis (16 May 2012, personal communication) said readers prompted him ‘to look where I didn’t look before’ or tell him when he got things wrong. One of the reasons he enjoys blogging is because the response and the correction cycle is accelerated:
I think it makes me a better journalist. The readers tick me off, and there are occasions now through the week on the blog where I will start teasing out an argument for the weekend column. It may take three days over the course of a blog to come to a conclusion on something.
Piers Akerman (18 April 2012, personal communication) said he responds to his readers because he considers himself an ‘old-fashioned person’ and it is ‘part of the obligation and responsibility’ he has to his readership. Susie O’Brien (24 April 2012, personal communication) believes people are there because they want to engage with journalists and with each other: ‘If you are placing your name to the opinion people are responding to, you’ve got to own that space’. She welcomes people’s comments, whether they disagree or agree:
I love it, I think it’s fantastic. It gives you a really unique insight into what people are thinking. At times they pick me up on stuff, like they’ve said ‘oh you’re basing your whole article on one journal article, that’s not good enough’. People are not just interacting with you but interacting with each other. I think it value-adds to the Herald Sun, it makes our readers feel more part of the news cycle. They become part of the news because they are commenting on what I write and they are commenting on what others write – they’ve got a stake in the process, they enjoy the debate.
Clearly some of the journalists see their role not just as moderators but also facilitators, and indeed Rosenberry (2010) argues that in order for journalists to foster effective deliberation, this requires ‘thoughtful, guided informational exchanges’ (p. 158). Merely offering citizens an opportunity to engage is insufficient, as people need to feel that their words and opinions matter (Nip, 2006). Conversation entails citizens responding and journalists doing something with those responses for the common good; otherwise, ‘conversation becomes a phantom construct on this crucial dimension’ (Marchionni, 2013: 141). The attitude of the Australian journalists in this study differs from that found in other countries. Witschge (2011) claims there is a ‘minimalist’ view of participation that dominates in journalistic organisations in the United Kingdom, United States and Europe. Indeed, Robinson (2011) found that journalists at The Capital Time in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), resisted interacting with citizens and resented the added workload. In contrast, none of the journalists interviewed for this study expressed resentment towards their workload or blogging practice.
It could be said that most of these journalists traverse print and digital media with seamless ease, and are practising to varying degrees what has been called ‘process journalism’ (Robinson, 2011). This is when a journalist writes an article or blog post which comprises not only their work but draws on comments and feedback from their audience. Journalism becomes a fluid process where conversations become news content (Robinson, 2011: 141). Megalogenis is a good example of this, using his audience as collaborators rather than consumers. He once commented on his blog that his readers are not readers in the old ‘letter to the editor’ sense of the term, but more like contacts, critics and colleagues), adding that ‘any journalist would kill for the people I have here’ (in Garden, 2014: 124). Other journalists said they valued feedback from readers; readers send stories and information they might not have otherwise picked up, angles they might have overlooked and correct them when they make mistakes. Susie O’Brien (24 April 2012, personal communication) said she ‘will take on board some of the things people have said […] you’re just not an island unto yourself’.
The unusual level of engagement evident, and the views and attitudes expressed by individual journalists, appears to be a profound shift in journalism practice in Australia, at least in this area of journalism practice. There was no evidence that their main motivations in developing audience participation are business driven – to increase user loyalty rather than to foster democracy (Vujnovic et al., 2010). On the contrary, the journalists said they had no editorial interference – with one being told to ‘do whatever you want’. Rather than attempting to attract a large audience, they were allowed to cut as many comments as they chose. After a year of blogging, George Megalogenis decided to introduce strict rules on Meganomics, even if this meant publishing only 10 per cent of comments. He told his readers:
I try to direct the participants on this blog to observe some common rules of engagement. Talk to your fellow blogger as an equal, not as someone to belittle. […] I am seriously considering raising the bar on this blog to eliminate all those who don’t take my subtle calls to respect the reader seriously. On a good day, this new rule may mean I run 60% of what is offered as comment on this site; on a grumpy day I may decide to let just 10% through. […] You wouldn’t walk up to someone in the street whom you suspect disagrees with you and yell at them. So why do think it is okay to behave differently here in cyberspace? (in Garden, 2014: 127).
The notion that their blogs are considered not ‘real’ or genuine blogs by some commentators and scholars drew a strong reaction from the journalists. One said he never had the ‘slightest amount of editorial influence’ exerted on his blog and does not filter comments except where they are ‘highly obscene or defamatory’; another said ‘no one has ever ever told me what to blog, what position to take on anything’. Joe Hildebrand (14 May 2012, personal communication) said such comments are ‘complete rubbish’ and those who make them are ‘idiotic and wrong’. Such talk makes John Birmingham (13 April 2012, personal communication) bristle: ‘They are talking shit. Just because media blogs don’t cover the same topics in the same way as outsider blogs doesn’t make them any less real. It just makes them different’.
Rosenberry and St. John (2010a) suggest that professional journalists working for mainstream news organisations are in a unique position to engage citizens as they are the source to which the public usually turn for information about politics and public affairs. Their use of blogs may create a space ‘where issues of common concern are addressed to the benefit of some greater public’ (Rosenberry and St. John, 2010b: 6) and there are valid journalistic reasons (as well as financial) for involving the audience, especially if forums for civic conversation can be created (Williams, 2007: 3). The practices of these Australian journalist-bloggers challenge the criticisms by scholars (including Australian ones) that mainstream media’s real motive is to contain and direct the phenomenon rather than foster real democratic participation (Lowrey, 2006), and that their blogs are mere ‘token gestures’ because journalists are not willing to give up their power over the flow of information (Hutchins, 2007: 210).
It has been found that the structural and cultural characteristics of newsrooms influence the work of journalists. Domingo (2008) argues that the professional culture does not ‘exist in a vacuum’ but is ‘recreated and renegotiated in every production task, in the design of the content management software or in the staffing decisions’ (p. 698). Scholars theorise that blogging challenges journalism’s normative foundations and journalists are faced with tensions and difficulties negotiating the new participatory digital environment (Carlson, 2007; Hermida and Thurman, 2008; Lasorsa et al., 2012; Singer, 2005). They need to re-interpret their professional norms and practices in a new media format because they would have been used to ‘centralized, routinized, conventionalized reportage’ (Carlson, 2007: 275). Although not of journalist-bloggers per se, a recent survey of 583 US journalists (Nielsen, 2013) found they are ‘maintaining their jurisdiction over news content’ and that ‘journalistic norms and conceptions of expertise prevent journalists from engaging with readers’.
While such challenges and journalistic norms may apply to the nine journalists who were already employed by their news organisations before they took on blogging as part of their journalistic work, they would not apply to veteran bloggers Peter Brent, Tim Blair and John Birmingham who were independent bloggers before being recruited by their respective news organisations. And it would not apply to Jack the Insider who was also recruited as a blogger although he had no prior experience using this format. Notably, some of the journalists in this study have never worked in newsrooms. One told me he rarely visits the newsroom of the organisation he works for. Even the journalists who took on blogging as part of their professional practice work increasingly from home. This means the extent of such influence is becoming less clear – at least for this group of journalists. Or perhaps they have resolved (or simply by-passed) the difficulties and tension that scholars claim is evidently occurring in news organisations in other countries? Another reason may be that all the journalists in this study – with the exception of Chris Kenny – have been blogging for a number of years.
It must be noted that while some commenters argue that blogs are dying or becoming irrelevant because political conversation is migrating to social media platforms, this trend is not apparent in Australia. Although the original identification of blogs took place in December 2011, a second inspection in December 2012 found that although 10 of the 114 blogs had closed, 21 new blogs had been launched, 7 of which were political blogs (Garden, 2014: 185–186). The wider study also looked at the use of Twitter by the journalist-bloggers (Garden, 2014: 177–189) and found that this usage is helping to integrate their blogs into societal news streams, rather than sounding a death knell. Twitter is a more open and public network than blogs and has clearly become a platform of choice for many Australian journalists who have adopted this medium to a far greater extent than they ever took to blogging (Highfield and Bruns, 2012: 95). Of the 13 journalist-bloggers, 10 were on Twitter, and used it as a complementary tool to publicise or amplify blogs posts. Most stated that the 140-character limit means it is not suited for the in-depth analysis or conversation that can occur on their blogs. Furthermore, a new trend emerged during the course of the study is Live Blogging, an increasingly popular component due to their timeliness and small content units. Such blogging has been studied elsewhere (Thurman and Walters, 2013), although, to date, there have been no studies of how this format is being used on Australian news sites.
Conclusion
This study found that there are not many political blogs by journalists on Australian mainstream news sites and most of them are on News Limited sites. Regardless, there is no question that some of them (for example, those of Jack the Insider, Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair) have more influence than some of their alternative counterparts (Garden, 2014; Green, 2012). Although there seems to be a consensus in the scholarly literature that traditional media have failed to take advantage of the affordances of the blog format, for most Australian journalist-bloggers, participation is an integral part of their blogging practice. This challenges the widespread view that news organisations are ambivalent towards, and even suspicious of, audience participation and have failed to take advantage of the interactive opportunities online. All the journalists interviewed saw blogging as an opportunity to have a conversation with readers who give tips and hints, correct and even challenge them.
While not historically part of journalism’s normative framework, the concept of journalism as participation is emerging as an integral feature of news organisations in the digital age, with scholars suggesting that audience involvement has become a normative goal of digital journalism (Lewis, 2012). On Australian mainstream news sites, the normative appears to have become an actuality. While much has been said about the potential of independent blogs to shape democracy and reinvigorate the public sphere, scholars also need to consider mainstream media blogs. These blogs are not mere window dressing to attract audiences and boost revenue. Some reflect a second and more promising phase of public journalism, offering new avenues for citizen participation in the political process. Although Twitter has become an essential tool for some journalist-bloggers to promote their latest posts, and also interact with members of the public, most prefer to have reflective, in-depth conversation on their blogs. Rather than declining, it appears that blogs are evolving, with a trend towards cross-posting on other platforms.
There are several limitations to this study, which could be addressed in future research. First, due to time and financial constraints, only one comment-thread from each of the 13 blogs was examined. These comment-threads focused on a specific issue (asylum seekers) which limits this study’s potential for generalisation. A much clearer picture and a more reliable gauge of interactivity (and other indicators) could be gleaned if threads over a longer period, say a month, were examined. This would mean a range of topics could be covered as the topic of debate is a relevant variable for explaining variation in participation (Janssen and Kies, 2005). Furthermore, some of the journalists who did not engage on this thread, or those who had minimal engagement, interact more frequently on other threads of their blogs.
Second, studying one medium in isolation ignores the fact that journalists discuss politics across a variety of applications including Facebook, Twitter and blogs and these are often intertwined heavily and cross-fertilise (Wright, 2012). Future research could track multiple platforms concurrently to determine whether there is a crossover between blog commenters and a blogger’s followers on Twitter, and if a new blog post is promoted on Twitter, the extent of discussion that takes place there as a result.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.