Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks

Abstract

According to several 2008 reports, blogging continues to attract writers and readers (Comscore Media Matrix, 2008; eMarketer, 2008; Sifry, 2008; Universal McCann, 2008). This form of Web content creation has matured beyond public personal journaling to support citizen journalism or journalism produced by independent bloggers unaffiliated with professional newsrooms (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). The popularity of blogs is in part fueled by its interactive format: The blog tool is popularly believed to be a vehicle of democracy because it fosters decentralized citizen control as opposed to hierarchical, elite control (Crumlish, 2004; Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2001; Rosen, 2006; Scoble & Israel, 2006; Suroweicki, 2005; Weinberger, 2003, 2008). This inversion of elite control is the social outcome of a more interactive format. Blogs are popularly viewed as a form of social media, or media that is architected by design to readily support participation, peer-to-peer conversation, collaboration, and community (O’Reilly, 2004). Social media tools such as blogs enable Web content creators to circumvent the high transaction costs that once characterized usage of earlier media technologies (Gillmor, 2004; Benkler, 2006; Bowman & Willis, 2003; Shirky, 2008). Independent political bloggers that comment on day-to-day news command a readership rivaling that of traditional media entities (Armstrong & Moulitsas Zuniga, 2006). The initial public derision heaped by traditional media entities on these independent bloggers unaffiliated with traditional, professional newsrooms (Rosen, 2005) continues to wane as these bloggers gain respect among Web readers (Johnson & Kaye, 2004). Top independent political bloggers have played an influential role in holding public officials accountable from Trent Lott to Dan Rather (Meraz, 2008). The blog form has matured to resemble traditional journalism in form and practice: Top, independent bloggers now hire editors, blog full-time, and engage in investigative journalism acts (Stoller, 2007; Strupp, 2008). The growth in the independent political blogger's credibility has taken place against the backdrop of traditional media's loss of a media monopoly on news creation and dissemination (Gillmor, 2004; Rosen, 2006). In an effort to survive, traditional newsrooms have embraced newsroom blogs as an alternative vehicle for news delivery (Meraz, 2008). This trend in traditional media blogging first grew to public visibility in the United States during the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions when traditional media bloggers showed up to “live-blog” these events with top independent political bloggers who were given press passes (Meraz, 2005). This study questions the agenda setting and social influence of elite traditional media outlets both among top independent political bloggers and among elite newsroom blogs. Using the hyperlink as an external marker of source influence, this study assesses hyperlink usage across three diverse issues in 2007 within the 11 newsroom political blogs of the New York Times and the Washington Post and within 18 top U.S. independent political blogs across the political spectrum. The timeliness of this study is underscored by two central concerns. Firstly, blogs have been widely heralded as a “democratizing innovation” (Von Hippel, 2005, Bruns, 2005, 2008); yet, this study questions whether citizen media outlets are really inverting the power structure between citizens and elite traditional media entities (Armstrong & Moulitsas Zuniga, 2006; Reynolds, 2006) through analyzing source influence. Secondly, this study examines how traditional media is utilizing the blog tool. The question can be posed: Do elite media entities utilize their newsroom political blogs as tools for forging networked conversations with the best of independent political blogging, or has it continued to “normalize the blog form” (Singer, 2005) with insular and parochial linking practices to other traditional mass media newsrooms? Such practices would indicate that this “more of the same journalism” may not be an effective gatekeeping practice for traditional newsrooms who seek to reconnect with engaged Web publics. Agenda setting has systematically sought to document the effects of mass media on the audience's cognitions. By virtue of creating a shared, national pseudo-environment, mass media fulfill the important function of building a public consensus on the important issues of the day (Lippmann, 1949; McCombs, 1997; McCombs, 2004). As one of the more enduring and most researched theories in mass communication and political communication (Bryant & Miron, 2004; McCombs, 2004; Weaver, 2007), agenda setting has matured as a theory to include a second-level agenda setting component (attribute agenda setting), a psychological component to explain individual-level agenda setting effects (need for orientation), an emphasis on how the media's agenda is shaped, and an explanation for the