Blogosphere and Journalists
This post covers the paper that Kevin Wallsten is presenting at HICSS at the e-government minitrack.
Kevin is trying to assess the relationship between the blogosphere and journalists.
He looked at the A-list blogs by combining two main authority indices of blogs – Karpf’s BAI index and The Truth Laid Bear.
His findings: Since 2004 until 2008 there is a steady increase of the coverage of popular political blogs in print media. He also reports on a similar phenomenon that we encountered in the retroV project – a power-law distribution (a skewed distribution) of citations of blogs. In other words, most of the articles in printed newspapers cite a small number of blogs – mainly Huffington post and DailyKos – Wallsten claims for a 80-20 distribution.
His results show that most journalist quote/or cite information from blogs and that one of the main topics in which journalist turn to bloggers to seek information is in election time on topics related to the election. Finally, he showed that liberal blogs are far likely to be cited than conservative blogs. (Frank Bannister raised an important question of whether liberal are cited more because the examined journals were more liberals in their nature).