Here is a version of a paper on blogging I presented to the University of Sunderland Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies. It was intended as an overview, a quick, rough and ready sketch map of the terrain to stimulate debate among academic colleagues but some of it might be of wider interest...
Weblogs: Techological tweak or paradigm shift?
Extracts from a paper presented to the University of Sunderland Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies by Philip Young on Monday, May 9
Welcome to my talk on: “How the facsimile machine changed human discourse…” Would that work? Can we say that faxes changed anything?
Recently one of my academic colleagues from another University asked, quite seriously, “Why write about blogging? - we wouldn’t do one on the impact of fax machine...” So, is there a difference? Is blogging just a new twist on technology or something of more significance for mass communiations studies..?
There are many different theoretical perspectives from which to approach academic study of web logs – from fandom and uses and gratifications to examinations of the public sphere. Tonight am going to look at blogging from approaches taken from the two subjects I teach – journalism and public relations.
Show Kyptonite bike lock clip Download bikelock.mov
News stories forefront human interest and relevance. I was interested in this story because it was relevant to my hobby, cycling. Non-cyclists might be interested because it’s unusual – maybe just because they like to see middle aged men - who should know better than to wear lycra - get their comeuppance.
In his book Talespin, (2005, London: Kogan Page) Gerry McCusker says most PR Disasters fall into one of three story categories – it might not have the academic gloss of Galtung & Ruge but it’s a good perspective on news values, particularly the news values of the blogosphere. They are:
• Tut, tut…
• That’s weird…
• Poor bastard…
Kryptonite has an element of all three. They key thing is, how do we know about this story at all. It wouldn’t make the mainstream press in its raw form – man phones newspaper and says look what I can do – it’s disgraceful. It might make bike mags and could conceivably be picked up by mainstream.
Interestingly, wired.com notes “The lock's flaw was apparently first publicized in 1992 in the United Kingdom, according to BikeBiz.com. The BBC even covered it, but the news apparently didn't resurface until a dozen years later."
So it might have reached me by word of mouth – but not very likely as I don’t read cycle mags and my main cycling chum now lives in Ipswich. Yes, I saw it on the internet. And not on a cycling site but a blog that talked about media…
From a PR perspective, who are the publics in this story? Obviously customers – which we can divide down into existing customers – those who have spent money on something that doesn’t work, and potential customers - those who won’t now spend money on something they know doesn’t work. This rapidly becomes a reputational issue and one that Kryptonite had to address very quickly. The key point is that technology meant the biro technique travelled around the world and had major consequences.
Other possible starting points for this analysis – is it fax-style step forward vs a paradigm shift? - can be drawn from the observations of two newspaper magnates … Rupert Murdoch addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors or a 12-year-old Philip Young, with a pad of paper and a packet of (new fangled) felt tip pens…
So, obviously, start with me. Picture me in my bedroom writing and drawing my own newspaper. Do you remember reading it? No? That’s probably for two reasons - There were a distinct lack of news and the fact that most of you didn’t live within 100 yards of my home in Cheshire. For its ‘news’ my paper depended on moonshots and invented Man Utd reports. And distribution – done by hand so depended on me selling the same copy several times. Not a winning business model. (But I probably had more readers than some blogs!)
Ten years on, I joined Wilmslow Advertiser and very soon had the defining journalistic experience of seeing someone buy chips wrapped in my stories.
1996: Joined a small PR consultancy, Apollo Communicatiosn – a return to my bedroom - but this time it embraced new technology – a fax machine. Did well!
Why these examples? They illustrate some key media concepts
• Cultural reach
• Political economy
• Technological innovation.
They are of varying significance, and for purposes of this talk best summed up by…
Reach First paper had limited impact – hampered by technology and capital! Political economy Enables purchase of technology and content. Newspapers need to make money – cover price and advertising which in turn drives content.
Technology: A major drawback for my first paper. Much easier to run Apollo with computer and fax machine - vital for speed efficiency (otherwise it was sending press releases out by post etc).
Let’s pay some attention to my rival news magnate, Rupert Murdoch. Here he is speaking to American Society of Newspaper Editors on The role of newspapers in this digital age.
Murdoch began by admitting he was slow in late 90s – won’t make same mistake again “….it’s a fast developing reality we should grasp as a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know.
"We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it."
He goes on: "Thinking back to the challenge that television posed to the newspaper business, we can see some similarities. A new technology comes along … it is somewhat exciting at first, simply by virtue of being new. Like … radio before it, television was always going to be at best an alternative way to get the news, and at worst a direct competitor. There was no way to make it a part, or even a partner, of the paper. That is manifestly not true of the internet. And all of our papers are living proof. I venture to say that not one newspaper represented in this room lacks a website."
But a website isn’t the same as web log…
First what is a Web Log? Here’s what Wikipedia says: "A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order."
I think we have straightaway hit a major defining characteristic. Conventional website are three dimensional – Home page, and links allowing visitors to drill down into content, maybe using drop downs. – University website a good example – home page fronting large amount of content that perhaps no one individual has ever read – and, this is not a criticism, it can be very difficult to find anything. It is not a particularly helpful news source because at first look you can’t see what has changed. – Has news area and also has links – quite carefully controlled externals.
Have a look at my own web log, Mediations, and the rather better PR Opinions. The key structural difference is that there is very little drilling down – and the newest stuff is at the top. It can be read as a linear – if backwards - narrative Links are vital element
Back to Wikipedia: Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations, and from the writing of one occasional author to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many weblogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers… others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is usually called the blogosphere."
Some could make a lot of the importance of comments? Yes, but even good blogs don’t really generate a lot Blogs were some of the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal involving Dan Rather of CBS and some memos used on the show 60 Minutes II. Within 72 hours a coordinated group of bloggers had built a case that they were likely forgeries. The evidence presented eventually created such concern over the issue that CBS was forced to … make an apology for their inadequate reporting techniques. This is viewed by many bloggers as the point of blogs' acceptance by the mass media as a source of news. It also showed how blogs could keep the pressure on an established news source…"
(Interesting that blogs seemed to have very little impact on UK 2005 general election).
So the defining characteristics are:
• Chronological delivery
• Speed of updates
• Promotion of external links
• Low cost (hosting –not time).
Reach There are over 10 million blogs and the size of the blogosphere is said to be doubling every 5 months (David Sifry, Technorati, posted 15 March 2005).
Again sourcing Technorati, a cover story piece in Business Week claims: First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point.”
Business Week writers Stephen Baker and Heather Green go on to ask: “So what?”
Their answer will strike fear in the hearts of PR managers… “That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.”
As ever, where some see challenges, others see opportunity: According to Baker and Green, for David Sifry, serial entrepreneur and founder of blog search engine Technorati it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one: “It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time.”
The way (Sifry) describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation. Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. (He doesn’t reference Habermas or notions of the Public Sphere, but we know where he is going!) ….
While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds. Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Dave Pollard estimated that “only about 20,000 blogs (a mere 0.4% of all active blogs) have a sizeable audience (more than 10 regular visitors and more than 150 hits per average day)” For help with in assessing the reach of blogs I have used a paper put forward by a friend of mine, Trevor Cook. This is an interesting formulation – Trevor could be sitting in this room and I wouldn’t know. Unlikely, because he is to the best of my knowledge, Australian.
He runs a very interesting PR blog called Corporate Engagement and we have corresponded regularly for about a year. He was one of the driving forces behind First Global PR Blog week. So we are friends! Across the blogosphere the amount of content being generated on a daily basis is enormous. If the average post takes 30 minutes to create then on a day when 500,000 posts are created that’s a workload equivalent to 31,250 people working 8 hour shifts. Although impressive for such a new medium, the blogosphere’s output is still dwarfed by the staggering amount of original content produced annually by the ‘old’ media.
The range of blog purposes includes: (based on correspondence with Trevor Cook)
Personal communications: people who write about their daily lives for micro-audiences of friends and family
Focused interests (niche/ hobbyists): people who use blogs to communicate with fellow enthusiasts/ with shared experience ie workplace. Usually amateurs and generally recreational.
Networking/ Education/ Development: people who use blogs to learn more about professional subjects from fellow practitioners – Personal marketing: people who use blogging to promote their expertise to clients, employers and others who can influence their careers or businesses.
Commercial: organizations which use blogs to promote goods and services, (including news organisations) o Can include employee blogs (moderated) o Can include blogs that encourage customer participation (ie Nokia) o Crossover with focused interest/ niche ie software
Is resourcing the key – is it part of your day job? Where does the time (ie money) come from? But are ‘commercials’ blogs at all? Is there an inherent characteristic that precludes businesses from blogging? Can a business have a voice? We are instantly into areas of transparency/ astroturfing etc. Another anomaly – The Sun has a group of election bloggers. But were they bloggers at all – Where they just members of the public contributing personal diary pieces… no different from a newspaper letters page? For all but the commercials, Cook observes, it is a communications medium that has its roots, and parallels, in the letter, the telephone and the newsletter rather than the newspaper, magazine or radio program.
Certainly the most successful blogs are niche publications – focused on interests rather than broad range of topics based on newspaper-style demographics. But at some point the discourse breaks out of the two-dimensional relationships of interpersonal correspondences into the terrain of mass communications. The ‘stories’ gain a wider appeal. They become journalism, or they forefront material that can be the subject for traditional (professional?) journalism. Quickly, the debate is framed by a central theoretical construct (or occupational myth) of journalism - that of gatekeeping. Why is this news? – because we say so!
Business Week puts it like this: Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That's not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art -- like how to get other bloggers to link to them -- they reach a huge audience.(ibid)
Tied into this is a (questionable) assumption that commercial success is a guarantee of quality.
Online Journalism Review Senior Editor J.D. Lasica writes: In a segment on PBS's "NewsHour" last April that asked, "Is blogging journalism?" Joan Connell, an executive producer at MSNBC.com, suggested that independent bloggers aren’t journalists because no editor comes between the author and reader: "I would submit that (the newsroom) editing function really is the factor that makes it journalism." When citizens contribute photos, video and news updates to mainstream news outlets, many would argue they're doing journalism. But when bloggers comment on and link to news stories, is that journalism? Usually no -- but it depends. When the blogger adds personal commentary that relies on original research, or if it is done by someone considered an authority on the subject, some would consider it journalism. When a blogger conducts a phone interview with a newsworthy subject and posts it to his Weblog -- or does some research to turn up the address, phone number and e-mail of an alleged rape victim, as a number of bloggers did in July -- some would consider those acts of journalism, too.
Cook suggests blogging offers the enticing prospect of a new journalism which is more participatory, more responsive and essentially open to anyone who has something to say “So far the main contribution of bloggers to public discourse has been fact-checking, commentary, oodles of commentary, and the blogging of conferences and meetings. The prime difference between these early blogging styles or activities and stand-alone journalism is the capacity to generate original content in the form of reportage.”
Some commentators have reached the point where this is old hat: New York Journalism professor Jay Rosen reckons the journalism vs bloggers debate is over!
"Part of the reason is the extension of "the press" to the people we have traditionally called the public. By the press I mean the public service franchise in journalism, where the writers and do-ers of it actually are. That press has shifted social location. Much of it is still based in The Media (a business) and will be for some time, but some is in nonprofits, and some of the franchise ("the press") is now in public hands because of the Web, the weblog and other forms of citizen media. Naturally our ideas about it are going to change. The franchise is being enlarged. …. If my terms make sense, and professional journalism has entered a period of declining sovereignty in news, politics and the provision of facts to public debate, this does not have to mean declining influence or reputation. It does not mean that prospects for the public service press are suddenly dim. It does, however, mean that the old political contract between news providers and news consumers will give way to something different, founded on what Curley correctly called a new "balance of power." Big Journalism's answers have been: Knowledge of professional standards in journalism. Knowledge of our community. Knowledge of the story. The knowledge that comes from experience. In other words, the filter is reliable because it is operated by a professional editor who knows what to do."
Rosen draws a distinction between the media and the press. He believes that the absolute commercialism of today’s media has corrupted the serious business of journalism, the press, which is so fundamental to American democracy. For Rosen, blogging is our best hope of keeping serious journalism alive.
Political economy: Trevor Cook writes: "Only a few bloggers seem to have any serious prospect of generating enough revenue to be able to provide journalism outside the constraints of corporate media. The funding models they are relying on revolve around advertising, sponsorship and less reliably, donations. Already, most of the world’s top bloggers have ads on their sites. These are traditional media revenue-generation models and to make them work bloggers have to generate large audiences. The need to create and sustain large audiences will have important consequences for the future structure of the blogosphere and relationships between bloggers. At the same time, large corporates, governments and not-for-profit organisations are using blogging to by-pass the media (including journalist bloggers) and speak directly to their audiences. They are much better placed to take advantage of the ‘web as publishing environment’ than all but a few individual bloggers. These organisations have the resources to generate rich flows of content, and the brands to build audiences. Their blogging efforts will grow strongly over the next few years and have an important influence over the evolution of the blogging medium.
Corporate blogs Cook suggests: “To be successful, corporate bloggers will have to look and sound like the early blogs but corporates are likely to adopt cherry-picking approaches to blogging. Blogs will help companies meet the desire of their customers to be treated as unique individuals but companies will strongly resist any profound change in the nature of the relationship between company and customer or company and journalist.
"Blogging will allow companies to be far more agile in providing information, identifying customer concerns using direct stakeholder relationships - so less reliant on the media. Corporates will use blogging to have conversations about subjects they would normally now use marketing, media relations and other communications mechanisms. Blogging will be an extension of existing communication strategies. Anyone looking for a revolution is likely to be disappointed. The most likely corporate blogging strategy will be to create conversations, but conversations with clear boundaries and ‘no-go’ areas."
Conclusion: The future There was a bit of sleight of hand at the start – strictly speaking the Kryptonite story didn’t use a blog but I hope it made a useful point about speed of transition and interlinked – word of mouth communications breaking into the mass media mainstream.
Looking back to the 12-year-old me and my Mediations blog, there are clear differences in terms of (potential reach), less clear conclusions about cultural significance. If I had run a blog I would have had the potential for greater readership – if only to extended members of my family. My reach would no longer have been constrained by cost. It would, however, have been constrained by content. It would have stayed firmly in the Personal Communications model. If it had been me who had discovered how to break into a Kryptonite lock it might have moved in to the focused interest group.
If my readership had been wide enough it could then have broken out into he wider news arena. But if my content had been sufficiently interesting that someone had added me to their list of RSS feeds, or had registered on the radar of an aggregator, this would have been more likely to happen. Here, something about the shape of my blog cf a website would have opened up a new level of viral networking…
Looking forward, Murdoch said: “…just watch our teenage kids. What do they want to know, and where will they go to get it? They want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened, but why it happened. ….
And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community – to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet the people who think about the world in similar or different ways. But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers.
"We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented. At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net.
There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability (my italics!). Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists.
Cook writes: "We could see, as the blogosphere matures, the emergence of two blogospheres.
- Top level of relatively few blogs focused on building and maintaining commercially-attractive audiences
- Second layer of blogs more focused on extending their networks and communicating with a few people.
The interesting question is: will these ‘blogospheres’ diverge with the second layer feeling increasingly alienated by the concerns of the top layer?
If we can reasonably ask Trevor Cook’s questions, and I believe we can, perhaps there is some substance in the claim that the mass comms significance of blogging is indeed of a different order, that it at least has the potential to represent a paradigm shift.
Certainly, as the blogosphere matures perhaps it will become more important for people to understand who is behind blogs and what there motivations are - they will need to be decoded and in much the same way that it is useful to understand the political economy of newspapers etc, and become a legitimate area for media studies analysts to investigate...
Even good blogs don’t really generate a lot Blogs were some of the driving forces behind the "Rathergate" scandal involving Dan Rather of CBS and some memos used on the show 60 Minutes II.
Posted by: shredder | April 11, 2007 at 08:23 AM