Critiquing “Mapping the Blogosphere”
Research topic and researcher(s):
The topic of research throughout the scholarly article, “Mapping the Blogosphere” was weblogs. The main researches who focused on this topic, and wrote the scholarly article, were Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and Jaekwan Jeong.
Rationale of the study:
The rationale behind studying weblogs, particularly the six chosen by the researchers, was to explore the “increased… speed, reach, and comprehensiveness of journalism” (Reese, Rutigliano, Hyun & Jeong p. 236) available through these weblogs. By researching these aspects of weblogs, the researchers intended to discover the extent to which blogs relate to professional news media, how the political affiliation of a blog links to professional news media and how that is related to their linking choices, including the preference of international sites and authors.
Literature review:
- Technorati ratings were used to identify the top rated news-related weblogs.
- David Held refers to the globalization process as ‘overlapping communities of fate’.
- Weblogs or ‘blogs’ are the online postings of comments by citizens, groups, and news professionals.
- Weblogs have doubled in the span of several months to some 20 million blogs according to Technorati.com
- Transnational forms of political participants have moved to a global public sphere.
- The concept of ‘blogosphere’ recalls the public sphere idea of Habermas, a provocative if elusive way to think about the social ‘geography’ of public communication.
- When journalism goes online it shares aspects of hypertextuality, multimediality and interactivity, changing and broadening its basic nature/
- Professional media refers to a combination of features including a claim to ‘authority’ and the command of economic resources available to media organizations.
- Citizen based media originated from individuals and public interest groups seeking to express an idea or position within the public discourse.
Research Method:
In order to obtain the data needed to complete the scholarly article, the researchers first chose which blogs they would be focusing on. They did this by selecting weblogs primarily devoted to the topics of news and politics. Because they were interested in researching both conservative and liberal views, an even number of both was taken into consideration for research.
The particular blogs chosen, Talking Points Memo, Atrios, Daily Kos, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Little Green Footballs, were chosen to be studied because they proved to be extremely fundamental to the blogging community according to “Technorati ratings” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong p. 242).
In order to obtain information concerning the articles, the researches went through and observed the overall patterns and types of posts on the blogs, the distribution of sites included in the network, the nature of the linking content, how the blogs were linked, authors of the site information in the network, and the political affiliation of the sites. After recording all of this data, the researchers organized their findings into individual tables.
Subject of the study:
Aside from focusing strictly on professional media, the study also took into consideration citizen based media, or “non-professional media [which] commanded less commercial viability and may be based on a non-profit, subsidy, or no-revenue business model” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 239). The difference between this and professional media is the fact that professional media is an actual news source, such as CNN,
One thing did remain common with each of the weblogs chosen, they each involved politics. Whether conservative or liberal, it didn’t matter, aside from needing an even number of both; what was important was the fact that the chosen blogs were prominent in the blogging community.
Another subject taken into consideration with this study was the network in which it belonged to. What this means is that each blog had up to two studied links on it and those links had up to two links following those. According to the text, “[the links represented] all those posts and sites (if any) referred to by the posts in the first level – then to the third level, those sites and posts (if any) referenced by linking units in the second level” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 245).
Research finding:
The conclusion of the research was combined into six tables, clearly stating the information. The first table determined that “most bog posts either assemble material from elsewhere, with only general comments (38.5% of posts), or conduct some analysis on such material (60.5%), but [the researchers] tallied only a handful of posts that could be said to be on-the-scene observation” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 247).
The next table displayed the distribution of sites included in the network. These results concluded that, “close to half (47.6%) of references are to the professional news media (whether news-editorial, policy, or opinion journals), with most of those being to news and editorial sites (38.6%), either via a news portal such as Google or directly” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 249). An interesting observation in this table was that conservative blogs directed more links toward other blogs than liberal ones did. By completing this table, the first research question (To what extent do blogs make reference to the traditional news media, and how are those references characterized?) is shown.
The third table focused on the nature of the linking content. These results showed that, “[there was] significant reliance on the professional news media, both straight news stories (28.8%) and opinion (such as the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal.com) with 15.4 percent of references” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 249). In the third table the references to blogs was actually higher than in table 2. According to the authors, “this reflects the blurring of blog and nonblog information and captures the links to blogs hosted by mainstream media sites (MSNBC, etc)” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 249). By examining this table the second research question (How is political affiliation of blogs related to their linking of professional news media) is can be easily displayed.
The fourth table examined how the blogs were linked. Research showed that, “the main referral style was to simply reference the link… with 84.2 percent of cases” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 252). This pattern also appeared to be shared among all six blogs. Through this table, the third research question (How is political affiliation of blogs related to the affiliation of their linking choices?) can also be answered in more detail.
Table 5’s main focus was who was speaking, or the author of the blog. According to the text, “table 5 shows that almost half (43.7%) of the authored ‘units’, whether newstories or blogposts, are citizens, while almost the same proportion (41.2%) are affiliated with the professional news media” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 252). The fourth research question (How is political affiliation of blogs related ot their linking to international sites and authors) is best displayed and answered in this table.
The final table’s purpose was to explain the political affiliation of sites in the network. This research shows that, “conservatives blogs led to conservative voices. However, [the researches] classified almost half of the sites (48.8%) all six blogs led to as… non-political, in which we included much of the professional news media” (Reese, Rutligliano, Hyun & Jeong, p. 256). This means that the blogs managed to guide readers to a broader base of news. Examining this table is key to answering the last three research questions. Without this table, the political affiliation of the weblogs cannot be determined.
My own thoughts about this research:
Personally, I feel that this research is interesting to extent, but has some drawbacks. Based solely on opinion, I am not at all interested in politics which made some of this literary analysis difficult to read. However, I am extremely interested in the internet and technology, which made it somewhat more entertaining.
The way that the authors compiled the research questions with the tables made the data extremely easy to understand, which is vital when examining a scholarly article. By structuring the analysis this way also made the data extremely convincing. It is difficult to deny such blunt statistics.
However, one of the shortcoming to this research, and any other research involving the internet, is it is very unstable. A link used in the research could be working one minute and not the next. An interesting approach to this study could have maybe been interviewing or getting in contact with the authors of the weblogs.
Overall, the study was unique and appeared to have valid statistics, which are two elements that I would consider to be included in a successful study.
