Newsworthiness and blogsA proposal to examine how media professionals and readers perceive the news content in blogs

By Cher Phillips

Overall question

•Subject of the study will look at the newsworthiness of blogs compared to a newspaper in a local community and in a larger city

•The overall question will examine if the material in blogs meets the criteria for newsworthiness with media professionals and with readers testing gatewatching theory

Model• Where the idea came from: “News around the

world” by Pamela Shoemaker and Akiba A. Cohen

• Shoemaker and Cohen studied newsworthiness in two cities (one small and one major) each in 10 countries around the world

• Headlines from the content analysis were ranked by focus groups consisting of media professionals and readers

• Rankings were then compared with original placement in news and to generate info on how media professionals and readers judge news content

• Focus group results were then compared to how prominently the stories first ran

Study results•News and newsworthiness are different

constructs•News is a social artifact•Newsworthiness is a cognitive concept

(people measure what’s newsworthy)•Finding: “What people – even journalists –

think is newsworthy does not necessarily become news.”

•Difference between newsworthiness and news may be increasing

Question: Apply this to blogs

•What would we find out if we studied blogs by examining their content for newsworthiness?

•Is there a way to find out how newsworthy individuals think blogs are?

•Would media professionals publish the same kind of content a news blog publishes?

Research/Lit review directions

•Lit review will cover three areas:•Blogging studies and history•Newsworthiness studies•Theoretical application

Blog, internet research

•A 2005 Pew study showed 50 million Americans use the Internet for news on a typical day. In a study of 3,011 adults, 71% got their news online and 9% of all Internet users had been to news blogs.

Horrigan, John B., “Online News For many home broadband users, the internetis a primary news source.” 22 March 2006 Pew Internet and American Life Project. Accessed April 24, 2007 <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/178/report_display.asp>

Blogging as Journalism• In a 2006 study, the Pew Internet and American

Life Project found 34% of 233 self-identified bloggers consider their blogs a form journalism, 65% of bloggers do not

• Practices contributing blogs seen as journalism included verifying facts (56 percent do this sometimes or often), linking to cited source material hosted on another site (57 percent do this sometimes or often), quoting people or sources (15 percent do this often) and citing copyrighted material (12 percent do this often)

• Fox, Susannah and Amanda Lenhart. “Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers.” July 19, 2006 Pew Internet and American Life Project. <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp >

Bloggers as gatekeepers

•In 2005 study, Byran Murley and Kim Smith compared bloggers to Colonial-era pamphleteers

•The authors found bloggers don’t want to be journalists as much as they want to fulfill the gatekeeper role without doing the original work of journalists.

Murley, Bryan and Kim Smith. “Bloggers Strike a Nerve: Examining the intersection of blogging and journalism.” AEJMC 2005 Convention San Antonio, Texas, Aug.10-13, 2005, University of South Carolina. Columbia, SC

Bloggers influence on readers

•In a study published in 2006, Wirtz and Jones applied a two-step flow of information model to the influence of bloggers on the blog readers

•They found people who spend more time online are more likely to read blogs, people who consumed radio and national newspaper news were more likely to read blogs, while people who watched TV news were less likely to read blogs.

Citzen blogging content• In a 2007 study, Jan Schaffer looked at 500

citizen media sites (31 case studies and 191 survey respondents),

• Individuals running the sites connected success to impacting their communities by challenging local mainstream media to improve, raising awareness with citizens

• Site adminstrators say they added value to the community with 82 percent of sites provide content unavailable elsewhere, 61 percent reporting they watchdogged local government, and 27 percent saying they site increased voter turnout

• Schaffer, Jan. “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism.” J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism <http://www.kcnn.org/research/citizen_media_report/>

Relationship of opposition

•Journalists and bloggers have a relationship that was born in opposition that is reflected in access and privilege.

•But the kinds of issues arising from disputes over access and privilege hint that the content covered may be as newsworthy as newspaper content.

•Popular media sources can illustrate issues and struggles

Watchdog’s watchdog

•In 2004, bloggers showed that Dan Rather and CBS News ran a bogus report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard record.

• In 2002, the mainstream media ignored former Majority Leader Trett Lott’s comments asserting the nation would have been better off segregated until bloggers and online commentators pressed the issue keeping the story in the forefront until the popular press was forced to report on it.

Gillmor, Dan. We the Media:Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People. Sebastopol: Orielly, January 2006.

Different privileges

• In 2006, the Associated Press reported video blogger Joshua Wolf spent a record setting 226 days in prison for refusing to turn over video coverage of a street protest. California’s shield law protects journalists, but failed to protect bloggers from a federal investigation. Wolf cut a deal with prosecutor’s for his release, making the video public.

Access reflecting a changing culture of content?• 2005 – Garret Graff was first blogger granted a

daily White House press pass• 2006 — Blogger Mark Evan’s was “dis-invited”

from press events by Nortel, a company he wrote about in his blog.

• 2007 – Jay Lassiter’s press pass for covering the state legislature were yanked by police

• 2007 – two press seats were set aside for bloggers in the Scooter Libby Supreme Court trial.

• Katharine Seelye, White House Approves Pass for Blogger, New York Times, March 7, 2005http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/technology/07press.html

• DUBLIN, Califiornia , “Blogger freed after record contempt stint” POSTED: 4:51 p.m. EDT, April 4, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/04/jailed.journalist.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

• New Jersey Blogger Gets Press Pass Yanked, National Journal Online, http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/07/new_jersey_blog.php

• Bloggers get press seats at Scooter Libby trial , Cyberjournalist.org, http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/003971.php

Newsworthiness measures - deviance

•Shoemaker and Cohen used two predictors to determine newsworthiness

•Proposal suggests accessing content for three dimensions of deviance

•Normative – news that breaks the norm•Pathological/Social Change – news that

challenges status quo of the social system•Statistical – just odd, unusual or novel

Newsworthiness measures – Social significance• Shoemaker and Cohen used four dimensions

of social significance to indicate newsworthiness

• Proposal suggests accessing content for the following four dimensions:

• Political – impacts or potentially impacts governments

• Economic – impacts potentially impacts monetary systems

• Cultural – impacts or potentially impacts social systems

• Public -- impacts or potentially impacts well being

Theoretical question

•Proposal will apply gatekeeping theory to the content of blogs and newspapers by asking focus groups to rank the content

•By applying gatekeeping theory, the opportunity arises to test gatewatching theory

Gatekeeping to Gatewatching• Gatekeeping of traditional journalism

consists of three gates: the newsgathering or the “input gate,” the news produced or the “output gate,” and news generated by reader and editorial response or the “response gate”

• Interactive nature of the media today changes that

• Axel Bruns gatewatching theory suggests that journalists roles will eventually be alongside bloggers as gatewatchers, rather than gatekeepers, connecting information to give it context for their readers

Bruns, Axel. “Gatewatching, not gatekeeping: Collaborative online news.” Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 2003:107, May 2003: 31-44(14)

Potential research questions:a. How does the news content in blogs and in newspapers

compare? b. What content overlaps between blogs and newspapers? c. What kinds of content differs?d. Do media professionals find that the material in blogs is

newsworthy?e. Do readers find that the material in blogs is newsworthy?

f. How often would media professionals publish the content that bloggers publish?

g. What kind of content clears the media professionals’ gates and what content does not?

Research Method• Compare published material for the same time period

in two target cities: • Smaller, peripheral city should have a hyperlocal blog

(blog centered around a specific location) maintained by citizen journalists (not professional journalist, professional bloggers OK)

• One example of a candidate city: The Muncie Star Press (http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage) and the Muncie Free Press (http://www.munciefreepress.com/) Other suggestions?

• Larger city can be a paper of record like the Washington Post (national paper of record with comments) and then a national blog like the Huffington Post. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) Idea is to target from the top blogs in Technorati’s (http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/) most popular blogs. Other suggestions?

What to do with comments?

•A difference in analyzing content in the first phase of the study: comments

•Discussion area – how to gauge comments as predictors of newsworthiness? By the number of responses? Suggestions?

Second phase of study: ranking

•The model study’s scope was extremely wide— covering 10 countries and delved more deeply into the discussion of the focus groups

•This proposal narrows the scope to media professionals and readers ranking headlines pulled from the newspapers and blogs that could be done with surveys

Gatewatching test

•During the ranking, to test gatewatching theory, offer test subjects headline sets to rank for newsworthiness

•Then, ask media professionals and readers to check off headlines from blogs if they would cover, assign or think that the story should be covered in a newspaper

Relevance to course•Study examines the news content at the

individual level to determine what content is news and newsworthy

•The study also takes a seminal communication theory, gatekeeping, and tests its successor gatewatching

•When it comes down to what we see in the news, the final test of gatewatching is deeply connected to how individuals – media and audience – see content as having news value