WALL - Blogs are not a closed text with their intended meaning already fully inscribed

‘Blogs of war’: Weblogs as news 
Melissa Wall 
Journalism 2005; 6; 153 
DOI: 10.1177/1464884905051006 
PDF


Abstract 


This article examines current events weblogs or blogs that were particularly active during the second US war with Iraq, in the spring of 2003. 
Analysis suggests that these blogs are a new genre of journalism that emphasizes personalization, audience participation in content creation and story forms that are fragmented and interdependent with other websites. 
These characteristics suggest a shift away from traditional journalism’s modern approach toward a new form of journalism infused with postmodern sensibilities. 


Conclusion 


Much has been written about the origins of news as a cultural product born in the 19th century as part of the rise of modernity. Today, as we appear to enter postmodernity or at least hypermodernity, it is only to be expected that the news too would embody broader societal changes. 


This analysis suggests the outline of a new genre of news – current events blogs. While absorbing some traditional news values – timeliness, for example – this new news genre at least in part embodies characteristics that challenge our notions of what constitutes traditional news. 


In terms of their narrative style, the blogs are notable for their personalization. The sharing of personal information and sometimes providing diary-like personal accounts of events emphasizes the non-professional and non-elite status of most of these blogs. The use of personal opinion gives a certain intimacy to the blogs and suggests that the blogger is someone the readers can believe they know, someone who is not manipulated by a corporate boss or a filter of professionalism. 


The sharing of personal information and details about the sites themselves conveys a sense of transparency, suggesting that visitors are seeing the ‘real’ inner workings of the site. While it might be said that mainstream news columnists do many of the same things, the phenomenon here seems different. 


The opinions expressed are often more vitriolic and sometimes go beyond what is acceptable for a mainstream news outlet. 


Most of these blogs seem to suggest that ordinary people can comb through information sources, redistribute what they find interesting, and provide intelligent commentary – all without sponsorship of a corporate news company. 


Just as mainstream media establish a pattern of routines to create a sense of dependability, so many of these sites seem to rely on their own distance from power for their credibility. 
What is notable here is that credibility seems to be established in part by characteristics that are quite different from the traditional. 


Many of these blogs seem to turn conventional wisdom upside down – the more personal and more open about opinions a site is, the more trustworthy and credible it will be. Indeed, a survey of readers of news blogs suggests they are visited precisely because they are believed to be more credible than mainstream news outlets (Kayes and Johnson, 2004). 


Blogs are further perceived as credible because of another major characteristic assessed here: their relationship with their audience (Kayes and Johnson, 2004). Whereas traditional news outlets see audiences as customers who passively receive their product, bloggers see audiences as supporters and even peers. 


With a controversial war taking place, it is no surprise that ordinary people wanted to talk about the issue. What is surprising compared to mainstream media routines is that by encouraging audience contributions, the blogs assume that visitors are, to a certain extent, co-creators of content. 


Many bloggers respond to comments, ask opinions, and answer questions from audiences, challenging traditional authorship borders. (This was less true fornmainstream journalists.) 


These blog exchanges may well change the very structure of what we consider to be a news item. In addition, audiences also have the opportunity to serve as sponsors or patrons for the blogs they like, providing often much-needed financial support. 


Certainly, this fits with predictions of future communication patterns that emphasize consumers will participate in creating what they consume (Rheingold, 2002). Readers of these blogs ultimately help create their meaning, exposing the often hidden nature of consumption as an act of production (deCerteau, 1984). Here, this works on two levels: the bloggers have turned consumption of mainstream news into a production of a new news product, while the blogs’ audiences also participate in content construction and meaning production by participating in the comments section. 


In this way, blogs are not a closed text with their intended meaning already fully inscribed but instead come into being through this performance between the blogger and the audience. 


While some observers have written about new forms of news such as postmodern journalism consisting of ‘small stories’, what we find here are more like fragments (Ettema, l994; Moore, 1998). 
This story style reflects the characterization of news becoming a postmodern pastiche of small stories with no grand narratives. While many blogs cultivate a sense that they are outsiders from mainstream, corporate-run media, ironically, they often do not use independent reporting, relying on mainstream media for much of what they run. Hyperlinks then are important not just as part of a changing story form but in order to help establish credibility. 
This also means that news items from the mainstream media are amplified far beyond their original publication site, as they are seemingly endlessly reproduced by bloggers and through other online media. These displays of links also differ from many mainstream media sites which generally do not encourage visitors to leave their site, and certainly do not devote a third of their home page to linking to other sites. 
Indeed, where bloggers promote social networks, mainstream media are more likely to place commercial content. 


Thus, there does appear to be a form of postmodern journalism here: one that challenges elite information control and questions the legitimacy of mainstream news, that consists not so much of grand narratives as small slices of stories which are seemingly endlessly reproduced. Audiences and producers blur both in creating the blogs and in bringing them to life through an interactive performance between blogger and audience. 
An easy response would be to argue that these characteristics mean these blogs are not news; however, this fails to consider the current status of this important cultural category. News is a social product reflecting the values of its context. 


Just as other periods have prompted other challenges (New Journalism being one example) to mainstream journalism, so postmodern journalism is a product of various social changes, perhaps more evident here because the war seems to have heightened the appearance of alternative news forms. 
The arrival of blogs is part of other broader shifts within the media and society as a whole. For example, the notion of personalized story forms has been identified as a new trend in documentaries (Aufderheide, 2000) and within magazine journalism (Kitch, 2003). Within other genres of media, the notion of audience as co-creators is seen as well in game shows that allow audiences to supply answers, in much reality programming, in audiences who supply the questions for call-in radio shows. 
Meanwhile, increasingly accessible technology makes personalized media production ever easier for ordinary people. Within this context, blogs reflect a growing tendency for audiences to blend with producers, to turn consumers into producers. 
More broadly, blogs reflect a growing rejection of institutional authority (Putnam, 2000). 


While these processes are both potentially liberatory in freeing ordinary people from corporate media’s standardized homogenization and narrow schemas, they may also potentially contribute to a lack of national community and to ever narrower interest groups. During an earlier period of social upheaval, John Dewey (1927) argued that America’s new multi-ethnic urban areas could become communities through increased communication and that with such communication all people – even ordinary ones – could help produce their own democracy. Dewey (1927) also believed that the role of the news media was to activate the public, helping people solve the problems of their communities. Today, blogs embody the contradictions of postmodernity – they may balkanize interest groups and cater to partisan audiences but they may also encourage the creation of a multitude of virtual communities in which ordinary people feel free to participate and discover their own political voices. That is, blogs may ultimately pull more people into public conversations and perhaps provide opportunities for collective problem-solving. 


Those who fear the demise of the great society created in part by national media are perhaps overly nostalgic for a media that rarely reflected the entire community or allowed ordinary people much of a voice. 


Instead, we should consider that traditional journalism born in the 19th century’s penny press and evolved into the commercial product we know today as itself a meta-narrative for talking about news. Journalism as a modernist narrative explained news and provided normative ideals. The world was knowable and observable as an external reality; through rational observations and discourses by elite, trained professionals, the powers that be, particularly the government, could be held accountable and, ultimately, the institutions of news production would contribute to democracy. Today, the narrative is said to be in crisis as we are no longer certain of what is journalism or if it is truly contributing to democracy. This article does not intend to replace an old grand narrative with a new one but rather to suggest that this questioning of modernity and hence of journalism is an opportunity to rethink news and to ultimately re-imagine its future.