The Politics of Sourcing: A Study of Journalistic Practices in the Blogosphere.

Digital media lowers barriers to entry and has the ability to renegotiate traditional news-making power structures. However, it remains to be seen whether or not the people that use tools like blogs actually challenge those frameworks. Offline reporters predominantly use government officials as sources while online journalists and newspaper institutions typically cite their own pages and posts. In order to understand whether or not journalistic norms are challenged in the blogosphere, we look at the sourcing practices of a diverse group of 40 bloggers. Specifically, we sample 400 blogposts that discussed global warming between 2004 and May of 2007. Operationalizing hyperlinks as sources, we then code the 3264 hyperlinks in these posts. Results indicate that government sources are linked to the least. Instead, bloggers tend to link to the online versions of traditional news media as well as to other blogs. However, we find that bloggers also link to miscellaneous and civic sources such as academics and nonprofit organizations about one-quarter of the time, somewhat challenging the dominance of government and traditional media. We conclude that blogging on nontraditional topics may subvert who gets heard in an online world, but further research is needed on this topic. Introduction Developments in digital media facilitate participation, allowing traditional consumers of media to take part in the creation of news. For example, blogs enable diverse people to publish stories and op-eds free from the dominant hand of traditional news gatekeepers like editors and large publishing organizations. (For the purpose of this study, we define weblogs, or blogs, as online publications consisting of a series of entries or posts usually presented in reversechronological order. Most blogs allow visitors to publicly comment on blog entries or posts.) Some researchers contend that blogging exemplifies a new form of journalism in which neo-journalists challenge and renegotiate traditional journalistic conventions (Matheson 2004; Robinson 2006; Wall 2005). Others believe that journalist bloggers have normalized this new media creating an echo chamber in which mass media voices are reverberated among bloggers (Singer 2005). Although Sunstein and others contend that blogs can function like an online democratic public sphere where diverse voices have the ability to be heard (Kerbel and Bloom 2005; Sunstein 2007), many including Sunstein worry that blogs may just as likely create polarized and fragmented audiences (Adamic and Glance 2005; Hargittai, Gallo, and Kane 2008; Sunstein 2007). Furthermore, some scholars argue that bloggers maintain many normative journalistic practices, reinforcing the power structure that the traditional news media creates (Haas 2005; Singer 2005). To be sure, the ability of digital media to turn traditional consumers of media into producers empowers Internet users to challenge those practices. However, the fact that the postmodern press experiences lower barriers to entry with fewer gatekeepers does necessarily not mean that bloggers subvert the dominant power structure. In this study we use one measurement of the hegemonic structuring forces of the news media, sourcing, in order to understand whether or not diverse types of bloggers challenge journalistic norms. News Making and Power Structure Scholars have studied traditional news gatekeepers on both individual (Lichter and Rothman 1981; White 1950) and institutional levels (Schudson 1995). More recently, they have examined gatekeeping through the ways that people gain both access to knowledge (Williams and Delli Carpini 2000) as well as a role in the production process (Wall 2005). Although some studies illustrate how ordinary citizens produce journalistic content, fewer explore whether or not this non-traditional press follows or challenges traditional news norms. Digital media researchers interested in this social construction of news attempt to understand and explain the processes involved in the creation of knowledge. Some have adapted theoretical constructs grown out of print and video news research to the online production of content via theories such as gatekeeping (Williams and Delli Carpini 2000) and sourcing (Adamic and Glance 2005; Dimitrova et al. 2003; Hargittai, Gallo, and Kane 2008; Singer 2005; 1Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.