You’ve taken an issue that I’ve followed for a while and reminded me why it’s such a personal issue: the future of my own job. I’ve spent a lot of my time in this certifcate program following what’s going on in newspapers and how the industry is changing. It’s been a tremendous learning experience to see what other newspapers are doing around the world to get online. I’m glad to see you’ve brought it back down to a personal level rather than the more 10,000-feet view I’ve been taking. And, it’s really great to hear from someone who’s working in a smaller newsroom,

I enjoyed reading your resources, the Blogs vs. Newspapers and Gladwell’s response. Gladwell notes that it’s very difficult to find anyone who hasn’t been influenced by anyone. I find it’s sometimes hard to find completely original thoughts online. I’ll often read things that are links to someone else who’s saying the same thing and linking to the same places. As both the Shirley Temple post and Gladwell note, I’m looking for a diverse group of original content for my news.

However, news blogs have been around long enough to start to appear as the subject of scholarly research. The journalism journals are beginning to publish article about the relationship between blogs and mainstream, traditional newspapers. For newspapers, the news seems to be that blogs are not replacing newspapers or journalism as a source of news, but that blogs are filling a role that newspaper do not, or are not, filling.

Regrettably, the most interesting journal articles are not available online, and time has not been sufficient to get a hard copy, but the online abstracts are interesting.

• “Mapping the blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena” Journalism; Jun2007, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p235-261. This study analyzed the online network and link patterns involving six of the most popular news and political blogs, to determine their relationship to other blogs and the traditional news media. Findings suggest a relationship that is more complementary than competitive, with blogs relying heavily on professional news reporting for actual news content. [Perhaps suggestive of blogs being more analysis and opinion in their nature than a source of hard news?]

• “Use of Blogs as a Source of News Presents Little Threat to Mainline News Media” Newspaper Research Journal; Winter2007, Vol. 28 Issue 1, p99-102. This article reported on the impact of blogs as a news source on other media such as television and newspapers. One survey the article discussed, from 2006, from the Scripps Survey Research Center and Scripps Howard News Service in the U.S., found that only about 12 percent of survey respondents said they receive news from blogs in the week prior to the survey, and that only about 7 percent said they received news in two days in the previous week. [Again, perhaps suggestive that blogs may not be the source of hard news they are perceived to be?]

• “Mapping the journalism–blogging relationship” Journalism; Nov2006, Vol. 7 Issue 4, p477-500. This study also mapped the journalism-blogging relationship, through examining occupations. The study suggests that occupations exist within a network of other occupations that encroach into each other’s jurisdictional areas. External factors in the network of relationships include institutional loyalties and revenue needs. Internal factors include the degree that journalists can control the situations they face and their success in solving problems. The difficulties posed by the combination of these factors has led traditional journalism to neglect some types of news information, which in turn has been poached by bloggers. Some of these poached areas include opinion and partisan expression, “old stories” that journalism abandoned, stories driven by private and non-elite sources, and highly specialized content. [Perhaps suggestive that blogs are taking stories that journalism is not covering – perhaps filling a gap?]

Again, only the abstracts for the above three article are available. But it seems that some interesting information is emerging from the scholarly research.

• The article “Why Gartner’s blog estimates are shortsighted” in Communication World, May-June 2007 (available online, but through the Davis Library e-research facility) concludes that blogging is entering a phase of normalization and that blogs are being recognized as credible sources of information. This is described as blogs entering a “conversational era” as an information source, in a large degree a factor of a leading-edge technology becoming established the mainstream of personal and business communication.

You can access it at the following link: http://mcalabre1.wordpress.com/eoto-part-ii-reactions-to-eoto-issues/

Thanks,
Marina