JESSICA DaSILVA in D.C.

OK, so here it is. The final paper I wrote for my political journalism class for which this blog post is named.

Now, I’m a little nervous because even though I’m very passionate about blogging, I still consider myself a novice. In a way, I guess I was trying to prove my passion and smarts to myself in this paper. It’s not as in depth as I’m sure other people could have made it, but I thought I did a pretty good job.

Anyway, I hope you guys like it.

The Future of the Political Blogosphere

On August 19, 2007, The Los Angeles Times ran a column by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, called “Blogs: All the noise that fits.” The basic argument of the column is that bloggers bring a type of information overload that adds debate to the information newspapers already accurately report. Political bloggers do not put the same careful consideration into their posts that reporters put in their stories, Skube wrote.

In short, Skube is wrong. What he fails to consider is that because blogs are a different medium, they spread information in a different way. The purpose and desire to spread information quickly and accurately, however, is still the same. This is why there is so much potential for blogs to join newspaper and television as part of mainstream media.

Two days after Skube’s column ran, Jay Rosen wrote a rebuttle on his blog PressThink that was later printed in The Los Angeles Times. Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, lists 16 cases where blogs were able to spread information in ways newspapers could not or actually broke news before any newspaper.

Here are three political examples:

• February, 2006: Nick Anthis, a graduate student and science blogger, finds out that 24-year-old George Deutsch, who was accused of attempting to silence NASA climate scientists, lied on his résumé about having a college degree. Deutsch resigns.

• December 2006 – April 2007: Talking Points Memo uncovers the United States Attorney firings after months of research and help from blog readers. According to the L.A. Times, Josh Marshall and others gathered evidence “from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings.”

• March 2006: The blog Daily Kos and other Web sites show that a picture used by Howard Kaloogian, a California Republican Congressional candidate, to show peace in Iraq was fake. It was actually a scene shot in Istanbul, Turkey. Kaloogian loses his primary race.

Those are just a few of many examples of how blogs helped the spread of information. As the industry of print journalism expands to the Internet, it is important to realize the different roles that newspapers and Web sites play in spreading news.

Blogging provides a much faster outlet for the news than newspapers, which typically only run a story once a day the day after an event happens. Yet some argue that this might be irrelevant when it comes to political blogging, which they say is just too niche of a subject to warrant a separate blog on a newspaper’s Web site.

On April 2, an article revealed the results of a joint study between Ball State University and the University of Nevada, Reno:

“A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a small number of postings, failed to create much interaction between the blogger and the audience and attracted few audience comments.”

The statistics were reported later in the article:

• “While some blogs contained frequent posts as high as 57 during the five-day study, the average was 8.2, and almost 25 percent had no posts.

• The average number of comments for the five-day period was 33.5, or an average of 6.7 per day, which was skewed by a few bloggers receiving as many as 100 posts daily.

• About 58 percent of people responding to blogs contributed more than one comment.

• Eighty percent of bloggers posted no responses to readers’ comments.”

Erica Smith, a journalist and Web designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote a short response on her blog, Graphic Designr, pointing out a problem in the fact that it took two years to complete the study. To back up her claim, she shows the statistics of her newspaper’s current politics blogs from March 27 to April 2.

The Post-Dispatch’s two political blogs are DC Download, which covers national politics, and Political Fix, which covers local and state politics. During the week, DC Download had 13 posts, 56 comments and zero responses from bloggers. There was an average of eight comments per day and 1.9 posts per day. Political Fix featured 30 posts, 222 comments and zero responses from the bloggers. On average, there were 31.7 comments and four posts per day.

While Smith admits that the bloggers did not post as often as in the study, she shows there were plenty of comments. She also recognizes that bloggers should respond to the readers to help create dialogue among them. Smith also mentions that while the blogger should post frequently, it should be a matter of quality over quantity.

Another argument debunking the myth of the unimportance of political blogs comes from a column in The Chronicle Review by David D. Perlmutter. Perlmutter is a senior fellow at Louisiana State University’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs and a professor on its Baton Rouge campus. He also edits a political-analysis blog and is writing a book on political blogs for Oxford University Press.

In his column, Perlmutter stresses that it is difficult to figure out what role political blogs will play in the future of campaigns and elections because it is too soon. He writes, “political blogs are in a state of flux,” meaning that the direction they will take in affecting — or not affecting — elections is still to be determined.

Although Perlmutter addresses several interesting questions aimed at categorizing blogs, one issue he brings up is whether the political blogosphere will act as a new Iowa caucus. Because of the immediacy of blogging, it is easy to see the response candidates elicit from bloggers. Bloggers pick the candidates they support and oppose from very early on — way before state primaries even begin. The million-dollar question, however, is whether bloggers reflect the American public or a network of niche political junkies.

It is possible that blogs could fit into several categories such as fundraising machines, campaign literature, political operatives and much more. In the end, Perlmutter writes that it is an exciting time for students of politics and a trying time for professionals, whose “tied-and-true” strategies are being challenged by new technology. He reminds us that blogs are facing the same questions that television news faced in 1952. He writes, “One thing is certain: Blogging is now part of political campaigns, elections, and public-affairs debates; although the future is unknown, it will not be unblogged.”

Although political blogs are the newest mystery to hit the political scene since television, that doesn’t mean they should be dismissed as a potential outlet for legitimate news. There is great potential for newspapers to reach their demographic directly through conversations in blogs.

I recognize that there are bad bloggers in the blogosphere who take the responsibility that comes with writing lightly, but there have also been bad reporters. Adam L. Penenberg wrote an article for Forbes called “Lies, damn lies and fiction,” in which he recounted the reporting horrors of Stephen Glass, who was fired from The New Republic for completely fabricating stories.

“It is ironic that online journalists have received bad press from the print media for shoddy reporting,” Penenberg wrote. “But the truth is, bad journalism can be found anywhere. It is not the medium; it is the writer.”