Critique 1

Matthew Perushek, October 5, 2007

Research topic and researchers: Mapping the blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena, by Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun and Jaekwan Jeong. It was published in Journalism 8(3) (June 2007), pp. 235-261. It was retrieved from Communication & Mass Media Complete on September 27, 2007.

Rationale of the study: The main objective of the study was to better understand how blog communities create patterns and relationships between professional based media and citizen based media in the areas of news and politics. In other words, the study attempted to better understand weblog networks, which are the links that are provided to outside sites within these blogs (236).
Specifically, the research attempted to find (1) how often links are provided on a blog to other media sources, (2) the relationship between the blog’s political affiliation and the links to media, (3) the relationship between the blog’s political affiliation and the affiliation of the links, (4) and the relationship between the blog’s affiliation and links to international authors (241).

Literature review:
· The shifting of news sources to the web has restructured the media arena as we know it. This change has made news more accessible and quicker to get. The relationship between news providers and recipients is changing dramatically (236).
· Traditional media has allowed journalists to be “gatekeepers.” This occurs because journalists are the only people that have an opportunity to be the constructors of messages to the public (237).
· The blogosphere allows citizens to have active voices in the media, which creates more citizen-based conversation (237).
· New technologies can be credited with a lot of the changes to the professional media. Technological advancements, such as blogs, have allowed for more interactivity among the general public (237-238).
· The blogosphere encompasses both professional journalism and citizen-based journalism (238).
· Blogs are the fastest growing type of citizen-based media (239).
· Blogs have greater interactivity compared to professional news sources (239).
· Because blogs often rely on professional media, they could be considered supplementary rather than another alternative (239-240).
· Since the Internet is rather open, it leads to many cross national and cultural interactions (241).
Since the authors recognized that there is a new role of media with changing boundaries, they decide to examine the blogosphere within three particular boundaries, including: professional, political and geographic boundaries (238).

Research methods: The method that the researchers used was a content analysis of the weblog network, a.k.a. blogosphere.

Subjects of the study: The subjects of the study were six of the top rated weblogs that were related to news and politics. The researchers believe that only using the top blogs is a good first step towards researching online interactions (241). Three liberal blogs, including Talking Points Memo, Atrios and Daily Kos were selected. Three conservative blogs, including Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan and Little Green Footballs were also chosen (242). The activities of the blogs were observed from February 6-13, 2005 (244). The blog network was determined as the links to outside sources from the main blogs. Each primary (main) blog was allowed to have six posts/sites (links to outside) that were involved with it (245).
The researchers observed 410 posts on the primary web blogs and 779 links to outside sources from those primary blogs (245).

Research findings: One of the most interesting findings was that traditional media (including journalists) play an important role in the blog network. About 48% of the links were to professional media while only 33% of links went to other blogs (249). The study also found that about 44% of the authors of the blog posts were citizens while about 42% were from professional media (252). Another result produced by the study was that the affiliation of the blog affected the affiliation of the links provided on it. Liberal affiliated blogs promoted liberal affiliated links to other sites, while conservative blogs promoted conservative links to sites. What was interesting, however, was the fact that 48.8% of the blogs led to nonpartisan links. This was an interesting and unexpected finding (256). Another important finding was that U.S. blogs have not yet branched out much past national boundaries (256).
The researchers also applied the three boundaries with respect to the blogosphere. With respect to the professional boundary, the results found that blogs provide an additional “second market” to the traditional media. The blogs rely heavily on professional news, which is most evident in the fact that the blogs usually discuss items that were first brought up in the professional media. The researchers also explained that the line between professional media and citizen media is slowly disappearing, which means that the two are becoming more intertwined (257-258). With respect to the political boundary, the greatest find was that many nonpartisan sources were offered within the blogosphere, which could indicate that we are not that divergent as a society (258). With respect to the geographic boundary, the most important finding was that the cross-nationalization of the blogosphere is yet to happen. However, here the researchers indicated an area that could be studied further. They explained that a cross-national study of the boundaries could be useful, and it is something that should be pursued in the future (258).

My position: The study was neatly organized and executed, which I liked about it. Also, I liked that the researchers used a content analysis method, mostly because this method exposed the researchers to the blogosphere first-hand, and it allowed them to make proper interpretations. This is a new area within the field of communication studies, and I like how the authors addressed that when explaining their study. I especially enjoyed how the researchers gave direction on what research could be done next in this field. This is an important step in the expansion of such an undeveloped issue like this one.
With that said, I believe that the study had one major flaw. The authors only used six of the top blogs in their study, which is a fact that they acknowledge in their writing. However, the problem that I have with using such a small amount of subjects is that I don’t think that the results can be generalized to the real world, or in other words, to the entire blogosphere. The study can only be used to infer the behavior of “top” weblogs, and unfortunately it cannot be used for all weblogs.