Blogs, A Day in the Life

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

And what about those Americans who perused their favorite blogs on May 11? Did they find there something different from what was in mainstream media? What did they learn about the big news stories that did not make it to the other outlets?

To find out, we examined seven blogs, selected to offer a range of types, so as to closely examine the subject matter discussed, the places bloggers get their news, the level of reporting that exists, and the relationship with readers and with the mainstream media.

What we found, generally, is that readers of those blogs learned of some of the same stories that were in the traditional media that day, but often from a different angle or different source. They also heard about many items not found in the other media, such as a scholarly debate over the concept of a “living constitution,” a recent blogger convention in Nashville, a controversy at Commonweal Magazine over the dismissal of the editor, thoughts from a group of Iranian bloggers who met with one of their presidential candidates, and the blogger Wonkette’s “Bushfish” logo. In this regard, the bloggers are adding not just opinion to the media mix, but also new items to the agenda. Those new items can vary widely. Unlike a news organization where a group of minds is behind the selection of stories and the editing process, blogs are truly one-person shows, as is apparent in the topics that sometimes receive focus.

Bloggers are also not simply reacting to what they have read in the mainstream media. The posts themselves have the feel of a small circle of friends talking to each other, often with their own language, and without a good deal of background explanation. Many of the blogs linked back and forth to each other or to other blogs through the course of the day. Very little of what a journalist would call actual reporting was evident. There was also an implicit expectation that readers were familiar with the places linked to and had been following the conversation among them. Some of this insider feel and internal code is doubtless due to the shorthand nature of the way blogs are written, but it goes beyond that. One also gets the sense the insider feel is part of the appeal of blogging and blog reading in the first place.

For our Day in the Life study, we examined six different traditional text-driven blogs that offer a mix of ideology and formats. We first looked at the most popular blogs by average daily traffic and included the one at the top.¹ Moving down that list, we then picked the next most popular blogs that offered a mix of political ideology and geography. Then we added a seventh blog of another type called a video blog, or vlog, to see how that approach differs from more traditional, text-based blogs. The blogs are as follows:

• Daily Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga; highest ranking blog overall, liberal, based in Berkeley , Cal.)
• Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds; highest ranking conservative blog, based at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville )
• Eschaton (Duncan Black (aka Atrios); fourth ranked overall, liberal, based in Philadelphia )
• Talking Points Memo (Joshua Micah Marshall; not ranked here but receives over 500,000 monthly visitors, liberal, based in Washington, D.C.)
• Little Green Footballs (Charles and Michael Johnson; usually in the top ten list, conservative, based on the West Coast).
• Power Line (lawyers John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and Paul Mirengoff; ranked 9th overall, conservative, two of the three bloggers based in Minnesota , the third in D.C.)
• Crooks and Liars (John Amato; liberal, based in Los Angeles and one of the first to experiment with vlogs)