Audiences as Media Producers: Content Analysis of 260 Blogs

Advertised by blogger.com as “push-button publishing for the people,” blogs provide the opportunity for amateur journalism and personalized publishing. Blogger.com, the fastest and most prominent provider, claims 750,000 subscribers (www.blogger.com, accessed January 2004). Some of the most frequently cited blogs are hosted by journalists, like Andrew Sullivan (www. andrewsullivan.com) and Mickey Klaus (www.klausfiles.com). A weblog or blog is a webpage that consists of regular or daily posts, arranged in reverse chronological order and archived (e.g., Herring, Kouper, Scheidt & Wright, 2004). Blogs present a significant topic of study because they provide the opportunity to study media audiences as content producers instead of content consumers (Dominick, 1999; Papacharissi, 2002a, 2002b). Blogs provide media consumers with an audience and a relatively audible voice; they also offer a virtual space where information ignored by mainstream media can be published. As Andrew Sullivan (2002) argues, blogging is “arguably the most significant media revolution since the arrival of television,” providing the ability to “make arguments, fact-check them and rebut them in a seamless and endless conversation” (A4). In addition, this study adds to the body of literature examining the role of the Internet as a revitalizer of social relations, together with growing research on the social potential of the Internet revealing beneficial and harmful behavioral consequences of Internet use (Katz & Aspden, 1997; Kraut et al., 1998, 2002; Nie & Erbring, 2000). Extensive studies of blogs have demonstrated their ability to create online networks social contact (e.g., Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004; Herring, Kouper et al., 2004). Communication researchers have studied personal home pages in the past (Dominick, 1999; Papacharissi, 2002a, 2002b; Walker, 2000), but they have not focused on blogging, which is different because it: (a) utilizes more userfriendly software; (b) sometimes presupposes a journalistic approach; and (c) dictates a diary-like format and orientation. This study analyzes a random sample of all such blogs to determine content characteristics and speculate on gratifications obtained from sustaining them. This approach should help