2005 Annual Report - Online Audience

The year 2004 is likely to be recalled as a turning point in the evolution of Weblogs, blogs for short, or whatever name eventually sticks for citizen-based, personal-journal postings. Given space at the political conventions, credited with helping unmask errors at CBS News, placed on the cover of the New York Times magazine, blogs last year were anointed as the next new step in the evolution of the non-establishment media that have found a home on the Web. By January 2005, bloggers and journalism leaders were meeting at Harvard for a conference on ethics and credibility.

Has the role of bloggers changed? How are they different from the traditional press? What concerns should the public have about their vulnerability - as with all media forms - to rushing a story to press without verification?

The birth date of blogs depends on who's telling the tale. Some say the first Web log25 was Mosaic's What's New Page in 1993. According to Rebecca Blood's September 2000 essay "Weblogs: A History and Perspective," John Barger introduced the term "Weblog" in December 1997. Then when Blogger, a Weblog application, was made available to the public in 1999, the number of blogs exploded as the user-friendly technology facilitated the medium's growth.26

In 2004, the signs of arrival were everywhere. Blogs began to receive heightened media exposure early in the year with Howard Dean's spirited campaign for the presidency. Dean's blog, the Blog for America, still lives on among so-called Deaniacs despite the candidate's exit from the presidential race in the spring. As of late summer 2004, it was still receiving 33,000 visits27 a day. In July, Michael Powell, then the FCC chairman, began one, and Michael Moore started a blog to promote "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Several news organs, including The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and National Review developed blogs that started to attract readers (UPI, June 2004). Bloggers received press credentials at the presidential conventions of 2004, and some delegates at the Democratic convention used blogs to share their experiences with fellow Democrats back home. The American Society of Newspaper Editors scheduled a session on blogs at its annual convention. In late September, the New York Times magazine featured the prominent blogger Ana Maria Cox - aka the Wonkette - on its cover and explored how bloggers were making an impact on the world of political journalism. Time magazine named its first Blog of the Year, honoring the Power Line for its role in questioning the authenticity of the memos used by "60 Minutes" in its feature on President Bush's National Guard service.

As the number of blogs grows, so do blog readership numbers. A study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that blog readership among Internet users increased 58% in 2004. Blog readership now stands at 27% of Internet users (or 32 million Americans), up from 17% in February 2004.28 Blog readers are more likely to be young, male, well educated, and long-time Internet users (online for six or more years). But the Pew Internet Project also shows there has been considerable growth in blog readership among women, minorities, and those between 30 and 49 years old.29

Blogads, a Web ad network, conducted a survey of 17,159 blog readers in May 2004. The results reflect the youthful and highly educated nature of blog readers, but also challenge the assumption that those who read blogs are exclusively twenty-somethings who campaigned for Howard Dean. A majority (61%) of blog readers who participated in the survey were over 30. Many make online purchases and get their news from online sources, especially in comparison to television, which they find much less useful as a source of news and opinion. Many are also heavy media consumers who often subscribe to such highbrow magazines as The New Yorker, the Economist and Atlantic Monthly.30

When it comes to setting up blogs, just 7% of Internet users, or approximately eight million Americans, said they have done so, up from 5% in February 2004. Bloggers tend to be young and Internet-savvy, and to connect to the Web via broadband. Finally, it should be noted that the vast majority of blogs are created and then quickly abandoned; only a small percentage ever develop a substantial audience.31

Growth of Bloggers and Blog Readers in 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, ’’The State of Blogging,’’ January 2, 2005.

Internet users

In addition to being "imbued with the temper of their writer," in the words of blogger, writer and editor Andrew Sullivan, blogs are generally valued because of their reputation for presenting stories that are perceived to be outside the realm of mainstream reportage.32 Bloggers speculated on the authenticity of documents that CBS presented questioning the President's National Guard record in the 1970s. And Trent Lott's controversial comments on Strom Thurmond gained wide attention after several prominent blogs highlighted his speech when the traditional media did not.

But just how different are political news blogs from the mainstream press? At the Democratic national convention in July 2004 there was much fanfare about the bloggers who were given press passes and were themselves the subjects of many media reports. But with expectations sky high and many waiting for the bloggers to break a big story, some wondered how different the bloggers' reporting was from the traditional press at the convention. According to Paul Andrews of The Seattle Times, the majority of blogs "regurgitated quotes and reported themes that were meaningful only if you failed to watch the speech or see TV and newspaper coverage."33

During the presidential debates this fall, the Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the content of five prominent political blogs to see how they mirrored or diverged from the mainstream press. The study found that the bloggers studied were generally writing and framing stories in the same manner as the mainstream press, but in a more "personal and frankly blunt" tone.34

Questions have also arisen about the reliability and accuracy of blogs. Doug Clifton, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, told Editor& Publisher in September that "The bloggers cover an incredible spectrum of credibility and authenticity, just like newspapers. We have the National Enquirer and The New York Times and a lot in between."35 According to research done by the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, only 10% of Internet users say all or most of the information on Web sites posted by individuals is reliable and accurate.36 Meanwhile, 61% of blog readers - again, a small percentage of the public - say they read blogs because they are more honest.37

As Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU and blogger, put it at the conference at Harvard on blogging and credibility, the traditional press tries to verify the news before publication. Bloggers tend to verify after publication, through the debate and responses of other citizen bloggers.38

Despite the growing popularity of blogs, there is only limited evidence about how they might become commercially viable. Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, told Media Post, "We're not concluding that there's a market here." Ryan McConnell, a consumer strategist at Aegis Group's Carat Insight, is also uncertain about the economic future of blogs. "It's yet to be seen whether blogs keep up the momentum now that the political season is beyond us," he said.39

The two most common reasons people read blogs, according to the survey of blog users, is to provide a better perspective, and get news faster.40 Those preferences generally reflect public opinion in general on why people go the Web for news: for diversity and variety of content as well as the speed with which the Internet posts news developments. And while few would doubt the potential of blogs, they are still experiencing growing pains that will force them to live up to the highest standards of ethics and credibility - not to mention potentially dealing with lawsuits for posting unwanted publicity - if they are to become a central part of the online media experience.

For now, blogs are largely an echo chamber and commentary channel, rather than a "news" source. Every so often a critical mass of blog chatter or a really newsworthy fact will emerge from the blogosphere, but their impact on the traditional media dialogue is still occasional. Instead, the overall impact of blogs flows in other directions.

First, the ease of creating a blog ("push-button publishing") allows millions of new people to throw their voices into the online "commons." It is even easier to grab a virtual soapbox using a blogger site than it is to create a Web site. Most blogs are probably not focused on politics at all, or even news in the broader sense, but rather are public journals. Not all of them gain an audience. Still, the most prominent of them have audiences rivaling some of the most influential columnists.

Second, even if bloggers aren't all newshounds, they represent a parallel culture that makes life more interesting and complicated for credentialed, mainstream journalists. In pre-blog days, the only real feedback journalists got was the occasional angry phone call or letter to the editor. Now every word Dan Rather utters and every sentence in The New York Times is dissected in the blogosphere. That must make journalists think twice about what they decide to publish - and what they decide not to publish. Journalists now live in the same panopticon environment - always being watched - as celebrities and public officials.

Third, bloggers have a substantial capacity to keep a story alive. The real-time nature of blogging shortens the news cycle to a nano-second, but the drumbeat of bloggers can keep a story alive for much longer than one news cycle. Look at how the Swift Boat Veterans worked for weeks before there was much attention to their campaign against Kerry. Look at how the constant humming in blogs and other online places about the return of the military draft kept the story alive even without much comment from the campaigns.

Fourth, it is so easy to measure things in the blogosphere using technology that provides an almost daily tracking "poll" on our culture. We know from a variety of measuring tools online (the Google Zeitgeist for keyword searches, DayPop for blog content, etc.) what the "buzz" is.

The larger cultural impact is that blogging has shattered the traditional boundary between "consumers" and "producers" of news. The audience is also a kind of newsroom, where ideas are absorbed, remixed, and republished.