Grafström-Windell.doc - 1 -

BLOG-JOURNALIST RELATIONSBusiness news in transformation

and

Karolina Windell

Over the past years the media landscape has transformed as new technology has developed. Digital technology changes conditions for and the pace of news production – making the borders between producers, sources and consumers of news media blurred. This article attends to the relationship between business journalists and blogs in order to explore the conditions for news production.Building on a survey among Swedish business journalists and a content analysis of news material, this article examines if and in what ways blogs influence the production of business news. The survey data prove variances in attitude and use of blogs among Swedish business journalists. The results demonstrate that business journalists are still reluctant to the use of blogs in their daily work. Still, a significant part of the respondents argue that it is important for them to be updated on discussions in the blogosphere. The findings indicate that blogs are used by journalists, even though blogs are not established as legitimized sources. The results also challenge established ideas of what is considered to be “news” and open up for a discussion on how social media changes the possibilities for agenda setting in corporate life.

KEYWORDS blogs; business journalism; business news; corporate communication; journalist-blogger relationship; social media.

Introduction

Over the past few years, new forms of media have emerged rapidly. An increasingnumber of technologies for online communication have evolved, such as search engines,communities, chat rooms, wikis and blogs. These interactive online technologies arecommonly named social media, and have democratized news content and transformed themedia landscape by offering journalists as well as citizens in general new tools forproducing and distributing news. Traditional media are competing with online newschannels – which naturally have an increased pace of news production and distribution.This development also create new conditions for journalism as it enable journalists to bothdistribute news and to find information and news stories in other ways.Social media also create possibilities for companies, other organizations, andcitizens to contribute their own news stories to the ongoing public debate. As aconsequence, the boundaries between different types of media are becoming blurred, andsometimes even disappearing (e.g. Hvitfelt and Nygren 2005; Kline 2005, pp. 249-250).Citizens who previously were consuming news can now publish their own news andinfluence the news agenda – a development that easily create confusion about who arethe producer, the source, and the consumer. Hereby, traditional communication models

illustrating news flow as transferring from a source through independent media to theaudience become insufficient for explaining contemporary news production.Social media include all consumer-generated content and can be defined as websites where the content is created by the actions of visitors. The transformation we arewitnessing today in the media landscape is hence primarily not about technique, but aboutthe fact that everyone with an Internet access are given the possibility to participate inonline news production. In this paper we are focusing on particularly one type of socialmedia – blogs. Blogs – which is a technique for free and easy publishing on the Web – areincreasingly referred to as new “agenda setters” for traditional media (e.g. Lawson-Bordersand Kirk 2005; Tremayne 2007). The emergence of blogging has put pressure ontraditional media to report on neglected topics, and blogs are increasingly functioning asnews sources for journalists (e.g. Herring et al. 2007; Drezner and Farrell 2004; Lariscy etal. 2009). This development is raising questions about the process of news production:How is news produced? Who are participating in the news production process? And whatrole do social media – such as blogs – play in setting the news agenda?In the political sphere, blogs are today an established power factor. Many of the lastyears

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news stories – that have been the starting point for political scandals in westerncountries – have had its origin in the blogosphere. Political journalists cover and use blogsin order to find news content. And blogs and citizen journalism play increasingly importantroles for the news agenda during times of election campaigns – not the least during thelast election to American presidency. As a consequence of this development it is apt toassume that blogs play important roles also in other journalistic genres.Today, media are extensively covering the corporate life (e.g. Duval 2005; Grafström2006; Kjaer et al. 2007), and business journalism has become a journalistic genre of itsown (Tunstall 1996, p. 354). News about economy or business has gained a prominentposition not only in relation to other journalistic genres, but also in the corporate world andin the society at large (Gavin 1998; Lindhoff and Mårtensson 1996; Tunstall 1996, pp. 354-373). Business news media penetrate and shape corporate activities by setting corporateagendas (Carroll & McCombs 2003), ascribing meaning to corporate events and activities(e.g. Hellgren et al. 2002; Vaara and Tienari 2002), and creating and circulatingmanagement knowledge (e.g. Abrahamson and Fairchild 1999).Despite the expansion of business news and media

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s increasingly important role asagenda-setter and “sensemaker” in corporate life, research on the processes of productionof business news is still an underdeveloped area of research (Deephouse et al. 2003;Johansson 2004; Machin and Niblock 2003). A recent study on how popularity is createdthrough corporations that are highlighted as “celebrity firms” in media content asks formore research un-wrapping the journalistic processes behind the news in order tounderstand how celebrity firms are actually created (Rindova et al. 2006). Considering thislack of news production studies in the field of business news and the development of newtechnology, in this paper, we enlighten the interplay between journalists and news sourcesby analyzing how new technology influences these processes. In this paper we raise thequestion of what role new technology, in particular blogs, plays in business newsproduction. By exploring the relationship between blogs and business journalists the aim isto provide insights that further develop our understanding of news production.

Studying business journalism and the role of blogs

The paucity of research about business news production and blogs makes thisstudy necessary explorative. The paper builds on two sub-studies: 1) a quantitative survey

among business journalists, and 2) a content analysis of articles about blogs in thebusiness press.

Content analysis of articles about blogs in the business press

In previous studies, content analyses of blogs have been conducted mainly toidentify the average blogger and the links between blogs (Herring et al. 2007). In our studywe are not primarily interested in the bloggers themselves, but to what extent business journalists use blogs as news sources or as channels to distribute their own news. Thepurpose of the content analysis was to identify whether blogs were referred to or quoted assources in the articles. The articles were collected from the database

Affärsdata

[BusinessData], which contains all major Swedish dailies, business newspapers, and some tradepapers. The coding process was undertaken in two steps. First, the total number of articlescontaining the word

blog

was collected from the first year we found the word, in 2002, until2006. The data set enabled us to map the development of the amount of articles about orreferencing to blogs over time. Second, we collected all the articles containing the word

blog

in the Swedish business press (including also the business pages of major Swedishgeneral dailies) during four months – January, April, September, and December – of theyear of 2006. This data set consisted of 83 articles, which were coded more in detail.

A quantitative survey among business journalists

A pre-study consisting of informative interviews with well-known bloggers in theSwedish blogosphere, media analysts, and experienced business journalists wasconducted in order to provide insights and knowledge about blogs and their relationshipwith mainstream media. Based on the results in the pre-study, a web survey amongbusiness journalists was conducted. The survey included business journalists at varioustypes of business media: print, radio, and online. Newspapers with a business newssection being nationally distributed as well as business news magazines were included inthe study. Included were also all Swedish online business news distributors and thebusiness news at the public service radio broadcaster. Altogether eight mediaorganizations were included (

Dagens Nyheter

Svenska Dagbladet

Dagens Industri

di.

se,

Veckans Affärer

Affärsvärlden

E24

, and

Sveriges Radio

), and 187 journalists were askedto participate in the survey. In total, 79 journalists responded, which represents just above42 percent of the total number of business journalists who were contacted.

Blogs and mainstream media relations

Gans (1979/2004, p. 116ff) emphasizes the importance of sources for newsproduction, and resembles the relation between journalists and sources as a tango inwhich the both parties are dependent on one another. In concert with the emergence ofnew media, the forms of sources as well as the relations between sources and journalistsare likely to change. The World Wide Web is one increasingly important source ofinformation.New technology leads also to blurred boundaries between news producers, sources,and consumers. The number of journalists who themselves are running blogs on theirnewspapers

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web sites are increasing. Many online newspapers are offering their visitorsnot only to read news, but also to comment on them. The visitors

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comments become partof the sites

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news content and can be read by other visitors. Sometimes the visitors can