Political blogs rely on mainstream media, not sources, for information

Since political blogs burst into prominence in the 2004 presidential election, many have argued that these blogs are a new and important form of political journalism that is increasingly supplanting mainstream media.

But a new study by an Emerson College researcher, published in the current (Autumn 2009) issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, shows that bloggers do little original reporting and that political blogs rely heavily on the mainstream media for their information.

“Nearly half of the hypertext links – which serve the roughly the same purpose as attribution in a newspaper story – in political blogs direct the reader to mainstream media stories. Only 15 percent take readers to ‘primary source’ material such as government documents or candidates’ public statements,” said Mark Leccese, the author of the study and assistant professor in the Journalism Department of Emerson College in Boston.

The study examined more than 2,000 hypertext links in six top independent political blogs – three liberal and three conservative – over seven consecutive days in January 2008 and placed each link into one of four categories: links to mainstream media, links to other blogs, links to other pages on the same Web site, and links to primary source material.

“I worked as a political reporter for newspapers for more than 20 years, so when political blogs became a phenomenon, I wanted to try to understand the similarities and differences in how bloggers and mainstream media reporters go about their work,” Leccese said. “Reporters build their stories from primary source material, so I designed a study to determine whether political bloggers do the same. They don’t.”

Readership of blogs has exploded in less than a decade. A Pew Internet & American Life survey in 2008 found that a quarter of American adults read blogs and that the second most popular topic for blogs – after “personal” – is politics. In a 2007 poll, 55 percent of Americans agreed blogs are “important to the future of American journalism.”

Almost half of the hypertext links in the six blogs studied – Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Talking Points Memo, Michelle Malkin, InstaPundit and Power Line – took readers to Web sites run by media organizations that employ salaried staff reporters.

“The standard format of a blog post is a link to a mainstream media story with comment and opinion added by the blogger,” Leccese said. “In that way, political blogs are like a newspaper comprised of only op-ed pages featuring opinion columnists who gather most of their information from secondary sources.”

About a quarter of the hypertext links took readers to other blogs. “This is the famous and now well-documented ‘echo chamber’ effect,” Leccese said. “This suggests that for political bloggers, opinion reinforcement is more important than gathering and disseminating information.”

One survey found that a third of bloggers consider themselves journalists. But this study argues that while bloggers may be considered journalists in the narrowest definition of the word—those who keep a journal or whose writing is featured regularly in a mass medium—they do not fit more common and widely accepted definition of journalists: workers in the mass media who seek out facts largely from primary sources and present those facts to media consumers.

CONTACT: Mark Leccese, assistant professor, Journalism Department, Emerson College, 617-824-3857, Mark_Leccese@emerson.edu.

• Download Online Information Sources of Political Blogs by Mark Leccese, Emerson College.
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Research You Can Use is produced by a volunteer group of faculty and staff within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The group selects new research from AEJMC refereed journals that may interest journalists. Journalists may use the releases for stories or for continuing education.

A PDF version of all participating articles are available for download. For a reprint, contact the person cited or Jennifer McGill, Executive Director, AEJMC, 234 Outlet Pointe Blvd., Ste. A, Columbia, SC 29210-5667, e-mail: AEJMCHQ@aol.com, telephone: (803) 798-0271. For more information about the Research You Can Use project, please contact Mich Sineath, e-mail: AEJMCpr@aol.com.

Nontraditional Online News Media Seek Employees with Adaptive Expertise

Nontraditional online news sources are more likely to hire people with broad bodies of knowledge (“adaptive expertise”) while traditional news organizations more commonly seek out those with solid technical skills, according to a recent study published in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

Dr. Serena Carpenter, an assistant professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, examined over a six-month period 664 online media job postings on JournalismJobs.com to gauge whether online news media employers prefer employees with specific skill sets or with knowledge spanning several topics.

Traditional news media were still most interested in hiring new employees with “nontechnical routine expertise,” such as solid writing skills, working under deadline, editing, teamwork and communication skills, and Associated Press Style. About equally, however, they also were seeking employees with “technical routine expertise,” such as content posting and management, image editing, blogging, video editing, and social media knowledge.

Nontraditional online news media were as interested in nontechnical routine expertise as traditional news media, but less interested in routine technical expertise (perhaps because they assumed new employees already had such skills or that they could be easily taught). Instead, nontraditional online news media were significantly more interested in hiring employees with adaptive expertise, such as knowledge outside journalism/mass communication, creativity, independent and critical thinking, leadership, and problem-solving abilities.

Regardless of their preferences, the job postings for traditional and nontraditional online news sources expressed interest in employees with some expertise in both areas, suggesting that teaching specific and broad knowledge areas should each have a place in the journalism and mass communication curriculum.

The study appears in the Autumn 2009 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

CONTACT: Serena Carpenter, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University, Serena.Carpenter [at] asu.edu.

• Download An Application of the Theory of Expertise: Teaching Broad and Skill Knowledge Areas to Prepare Journalists for Change, by Serena Carpenter, Arizona State University.
• More from Journalism and Mass Communication Educator
• More Research You Can Use

Research You Can Use is produced by a volunteer group of faculty and staff within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The group selects new research from AEJMC refereed journals that may interest journalists. Journalists may use the releases for stories or for continuing education.

A PDF version of all participating articles are available for download. For a reprint, contact the person cited or Jennifer McGill, Executive Director, AEJMC, 234 Outlet Pointe Blvd., Ste. A, Columbia, SC 29210-5667, e-mail: AEJMCHQ@aol.com, telephone: (803) 798-0271. For more information about the Research You Can Use project, please contact Mich Sineath, e-mail: AEJMCpr@aol.com.

Book Review: No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle

by Grace Jackson-Brown, Missouri State University

Rosenberg, Howard and Charles S. Feldman, eds. (2008). No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group.

No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle edited by Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman covers topics relevant to teaching and learning in the subject areas of media, society, politics, and cultural studies. No Time to Think conducts a critical examination of the speed at which news and information are delivered—especially as a result of Internet innovation.

In No Time to Think, Rosenberg and Feldman examine the news cycle in a series of essays. The Internet and cable, in their view, deliver news at such an accelerated speed to the public that often it is relayed as “live” events as they happen, but sometimes online even before they happen. One example noted is the acuity and adroit use of the Internet by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. A noted key example was the Obama campaign staff’s quick response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff’s red telephone advertisement, when it “whipped up a 30-second response ad that quickly sped to broadcast and cable networks and uploaded to You Tube—before that evening’s newscasts” (p. 3).

The following question, however, might be asked: Is the speed of the Internet only one stage of innovation that those within news media have traversed in the race to be the first or the fastest to publish news? If not, what are the unique characteristics of news via the Internet? No Time to Think devotes considerable space analyzing how news is told on the Web by traditional journalists, as well as bloggers, often with little editing or cross-checking of facts and a great amount of opinion. Professionals, public commentators, “experts,” lay persons, and casual public observers with an Internet connection all have access. But the authors of No Time to Think also consider prior ages of innovation, such as in the chapter titled, “Two Revolutions: French and Mexican,” which examines the history of the inventions of the telegraph and movie news reels. The authors credit the growth of newsreel theatres in London and the United States as being the predecessor to Ted Turner’s CNN 24-hour news channel.

The ten chapters of No Time to Think are interspersed with quotations from news professionals and others, as well as anecdotal examples, which could be used in journalism classrooms to stimulate discussions about recent changes that have occurred in news media. Chapter titles that reflect upon the content that can be found in the pages of No Time to Think include: “Blog On!,” “A New Protestant Reformation: Citizen Journalists to the Rescue,” “In-Depth Instant Results,” and “Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside: A Conversation.”

Rosenberg and Feldman lament the fact that newspapers as we have known them have begun to disappear or to cease printing (ch. 7, “Desperate Newspapers Play Catch-Up”)—even though it must be noted that the number, so far, is a tiny fraction of the 1,400 U.S. dailies and have mostly included papers in financial trouble for decades (exacerbated by the worst recession in sevenety-five years), such as the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Rosenberg and Feldman point to the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, which after ninety years of publication (as an evening publication in a two-newspaper town) became a URL (http://www.madison.com/cap times/) in 2008. Disappearing dailies has become a trend—about 10% of dailies folded in the last fifteen years—but it has not become as prevalent as supposedly common wisdom suggests.

And despite Rosenberg and Feldman’s criticisms about the menacing effects of the speed of news and the 24-hour news cycle, no real substitution is offered, and no substantive cure is given for the decline of traditional print and broadcast news media usage that could revive loyalty among readers or a general audience. The only advice given by Rosenberg and Feldman is to emphasize media literacy among media users, apparently to make them more critical and broader purveyors of news.

No Time To Think offers material that might be useful in teaching and learning about the intersections that exist between media, culture, and politics.

Old Tech More Complex Than New

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

In preparing for our stint at The Des Moines Register, I offered to help copy-edit at The Iowa State Daily, one of the most innovative newspapers of its type as well as SPJ’s 2008 winner of the best such student publication in the country.

As director of the Greenlee School, I also wanted to observe the transition some of our students make in going from the Daily to a metro newspaper for internships or employment.

I was given a 5-minute tutorial in InCopy by Kim Norvell, managing editor, whose terse instructions were reminiscent of my 5-minute introduction to a newsroom version of the IBM 5100 computer by UPI staffer Fred Albers in the Pierre, S.D., bureau in 1975.

The so-called portable computer weighed 55 pounds and its WordStar-like application required even more hieroglyphic code to type, save and file stories.

The worst thing about the $20,000 computer was how it froze every few hours because of faulty fans or, perhaps, because of faulty bureaus. (The Pierre bureau was situated in a windowless upper-floor closet in the statehouse, a hothouse in the summer and an icebox in the winter.) The best thing about the computer was the ease with which we fixed it, using pencil erasers to clean contacts and chewing gum to stablize fans.

True story: On election eve, 1978, hauling my heavyweight portable computer to a room we rented with buffet for 24-hour, round-the-clock coverage–a new concept then–I dropped the unit on concrete taking it out of a pickup truck, and its back cover fell open and bent the fan. As I cursed, Albers took out wads of Bazooka bubble gum and began chewing. We set up the computer inside, left the cover off, bent the fan back into place and used gum-wads to cement it in a cooling position.

The dang thing not only worked, it hummed through what turned out to be 48-hours of continuous coverage as Leo K. Thorsness defeated Tom Daschle by 75 votes (only to be overturned on recount, with Daschle winning by 139 votes out of 129,000 cast). I was calling elections that night, and after 35 hours, dubbed this one a draw–the only news outlet to get the call right, thanks to that tank of a computer. Read more

Young adults intend to turn to older media outlets in future

Young adults believe that in five years they will get more news and information from older, traditional media outlets, rather than from social networking sites according to a study published in the Fall 2008 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.

Seth Lewis, author of the study, explained that two issues are overlooked in the existing research that examines young adults’ shift away from news: their current perception of news and their intentions for future news consumption. Lewis says that the relationship between current perception and future intention has also been unexamined.

To determine young adults’ perceptions and uses of news and projected news source use  in five years, Lewis conducted a Web-based survey. The subjects were college students attending two large public universities and were chosen at random.

“…A better understanding of attitudinal perceptions and intensions can help us understand and estimate how young adults – a demographic vital to the future of newspapers- expect to approach news and information as they grow up in a digital age,” Lewis said.

Young adults who currently hold positive perceptions of news tend to anticipate using more traditional sources in five years. Lewis believes this study sets a precedent to future exploration of the connection between young adults news uses and gratifications and their projected, reasoned action, as well as the link between perceptions and intentions.

Seth Lewis is a doctoral student in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

CONTACT: Sandra H. Utt, nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org, (901) 628-2553

Seth C. Lewis, “Where Young Adults Intend To Get News in Five Years,” Newspaper Research Journal, Fall 2008, 29:4