Quick and dirty because I have a long to-do list today, but a recent survey of U.S. journalists has demonstrated the tremendous impact of blogs on news reporting, particularly in terms of speed, tone, and editorial direction of reporting. However, they have not had an impact on the quality of news reporting.
More below, with a chart.
Via MediaPost:
Jerry Johnson, head of strategic research at Brodeur and one of the people behind Taking the Blogosphere Seriously.com, stated, "While only a small percentage of journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives, they do see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea."
Journalists rated blogs as the most helpful in terms of getting story ideas and new angles, and gaining insight into the tone of a debate. Interestingly, they did not rate blogs very highly in terms of breaking new stories and identifying/validating news sources.
However, the study does confirm the degree to which journalists are reading blogs:
Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs
Nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week
71% of journalists have a list of blogs that they check on a regular basis
47.7% have five or fewer blogs
23.3% have a regular blog list of six or more
Nearly 3 in 5 journalists read blogs at least 2-3 times per week. Now, where are these journalists? According to the survey, 47.5% of them are lurkers, reading but not commenting. (Hi, journalists!)
::
A few observations/comments/questions:
- I wonder about the response that blogs are not influencing the quality of news and not breaking stories. I disagree, since blogs often post stories that the MSM may be hesitant to run at first, and only pick up once they reach critical mass on the blogosphere. (Cf. "Macaca," TPM, and Plamegate.) Is it a function of the reporters not feeling that they have the freedom to be influenced by the blogs due to top-down editorial decisions? Do they simply think they're the shizznit and can't improve?
- Why are 40% of journalists not reading blogs on a regular basis? What do they do at work all day?
- Amen to blogs helping journalists understand stories! Again, particularly Josh Marshall and TPM have been vital over the past few years in terms of really explaining the intricacies of key news stories, such as FISA and the ongoing White House email purge. Or look at Marcy Wheeler, our own emptywheel, whose blog work on the Plame scandal has become a legitimate book on the topic. But this tells me that if the blogs are indeed helping the journalists to understand the news, then they are raising the quality of it, right? And perhaps we should be concerned that so many journalists seem to need such assistance in understanding these issues. But then, perhaps few of them are genuine experts in a specific area of law or what the Constitution says. Only 50% snark intended -- the beauty of the blogosphere is that it allows experts in these areas to get their ideas out there in a way that can influence journalists and those with the ability to disseminate the message.
The Brodeur press release on the study is available in PDF form at their website, and more detailed information is available here.
Thoughts?