Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them - School of ...

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Introduction Although the term “blog” (which refers to a regularly updated personal web site with posts appearing in reverse chronological order) 1 has been around since 1997, political blogging seems to be a more recent phenomenon. According to most accounts of the history of blogging, 2 politically oriented blogs first emerged after the events of September 11, 2001 – as people turned to blogs to both express their feelings about the terrorist attacks on America and to locate information not available in the mainstream media (Scott, 2004). In 2002, many of the bloggers who were turned on to blogging as a result of September 11 th began blogging about the potential for a war with Iraq. Some of these political bloggers, such as Instapundit, Daily Kos, and AndrewSullivan.com, began to attract wide readerships as a result of their discussions of American domestic and foreign policy. In fact, some of these so-called “A-list” blogs (i.e. blogs that receive a high number of “hits” and incoming links) became so popular that many political elites and traditional media institutions began to adopt the form themselves. In fact, by 2004 blogging had become so mainstream that all of the major presidential candidates – ranging from Howard Dean to George Bush – had started their own blogs and both of the major political parties had granted press credentials to political bloggers to cover their conventions. 3 Some evidence suggests that the mass public has been taken in by all of this high profile blogging. According to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 4 for example, 32 1 There are countless definitions of what a blog is. According to Drezner and Farrell (2004), for example, a blog is “a web page with minimal to no external editing, providing on-line commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources.” According to Mortensen and Walker (2002) blogs are “frequently updated websites, usually personal, with commentary and links.” On her blog, “The Professional-Lurker,” Lois Ann Scheidt defines a blog as, “A weblog is a frequently modified website that allows updating with items that are grouped primarily by the time and/or date of posting. Entries usually appear in reverse chronological order. Contents of the weblog may be available publicly or through restricted access. Weblogs may also utilize special software designed for this implementation.” McKenna and Pole (2004) define blogs as "web pages that are regularly updated, operated by one person or a small group of people and developed for little to no cost. Individual entries or posts are chronologically updated like a diary with the most recent posts viewed first." 2 For a good history of weblogs see Blood (2000) and Blood (2003). 3 The credentialed bloggers posted their entries at www.conventionbloggers.com for the Republican National Convention and at www.cyberjournalist.net for the Democratic National Convention. 4 For more details on this study see http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP blogging data.pdf. 2
million U.S. citizens now regularly turn to weblogs for information and 9% of Internet users said they read political blogs “frequently” or “sometimes” during the 2004 presidential campaign. 5 This explosion in the popularity of blogging has been accompanied by a surge in the number of academic studies focusing on blogs. Drezner and Farrell (2004), for example, have found that journalists are increasingly likely to refer to “A-list” political blogs as part of their news gathering routines and that these “A-list” blogs receive a disproportionate number of links from other blogs. In a somewhat different vein, McKenna and Pole (2004) surveyed the authors of the most “popular” political blogs in order to determine who blogs, how popular bloggers use their blogs and what impact political blogging has on traditional forms of political participation. 6 More recently, Cornfield et al (2005) have attempted to link the content of “A-list” political blogs to mass media coverage by tracking the discussion of a number of high profile political issues during one month of the 2004 election campaign and Adamic and Glance (2005) have analyzed the posts of 40 “A-list” political blogs during the two months prior to the 2004 Presidential election in order to determine which issues and actors were most frequently discussed. In short, there has been no dearth of studies focusing on political blogs. While all of these studies about political blogs have provided important insights into the dynamics and consequences of “A-list” blogs, they have largely ignored the thousands of less read political blogs that are written by average citizens every day. As a result, relatively little is known about political blogging “by the rest of us” (Schiano et al., 2004). Perhaps most surprising in this regard is the fact that while there has been much debate over whether political blogging is 5 There is also indirect evidence that Americans turned to political blogs with increasing frequency during the 2004 Presidential campaign. For instance, the most popular political blogs, such as DailyKos, Wonkette and Instapundit, received dramatic increases in the level of “traffic” in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election. See http://techcentralstation.com/011105B.html. 6 Popular here refers to how widely read the blogger’s blog is. In order to determine who the popular bloggers were, McKenna and Pole selected the top 125 political weblogs using the rankings from four websites that rank the popularity of blogs: Blogstreet, the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, Technorati’s Top 100 and the Truth Laid Bear. Each of these sites has slightly different ways to measure popularity – ranging from the number of incoming links to the number of unique “hits.” In order to account for these differences, McKenna and Pole decided to include only those weblogs that appeared on at least two of the four top rankings. 3
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