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Blogging and Business Journalism:News Production in Transformation

Maria Grafström, Ph.D. Karolina Windell, Ph.D.Dept. of Business Studies Dept. of Business StudiesUppsala University Uppsala UniversityBox 513, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Box 513, 751 20 Uppsala, SwedenEmail:maria.grafstrom@fek.uu.seEmail:karolina.windell@fek.uu.se Paper prepared for the 5th International Conference on Communication andMass Media, Athens, Greece, May 21-22, 2007.

Introduction

Business media have expanded significantly over the past few decades.

Specializednews media organizations that exclusively cover business issues on a daily basis havebeen established, and today national as well as provincial newspapers include specialsections dedicated to business news. With this development, business news hasgradually become a journalistic genre of its own, i.e. similar to cultural and sportsnews it is separated from the general news flow.

News about economy or businesshas gained a prominent position not only in relation to other journalistic genres, butalso in the corporate world and in the society at large.

Concurrently with the expansion of business news, new technology has developed,which transforms themedia landscape by offering journalists new tools for producingand distributing news.

It has become possible to increase the pace of news productionand distribution. At the same time, new forms of media as well as sources of information have emerged. In the last decade, the development of Internet has enabled journalists both to distribute news and to find information and news stories in otherways. An increasing number of technologies for searching or distributing informationhave evolved, such as search engines, communities, chat rooms, and blogs.These new forms of news production and distribution are making boundariesbetween different types of media blurred, and sometimes even disappearing.

Thedigital technique is used by everyone regardless of original media type. This meansthat different types of media content today is produced and distributed through thesame channels. New technology has also resulted in vague differences between mediaand the consumer as well as between journalists and adjacent working groups withinthe field of communication.

Literature on blogging demonstrates that mainstream media and bloggers haveengaged in a symbiotic relationship: “reporters [are] sourcing story ideas frombloggers and bloggers in turn [are] referencing and linking to the news storiesreporters write.”

Citizens who previously were consuming news can now publishtheir own news and influence the news agenda. Hereby, traditional communicationmodels illustrating news flow as transferring from a source through independentmedia to the audience become insufficient for explaining contemporary newsproduction.Blogs – a technique for easy publishing on the Web and available for everyone withan Internet connection – are increasingly referred to as new “agenda setters” fortraditional media.

The emergence of blogging has put pressure on traditional media toreport on neglected topics by starting a massive information flow on the internet.

Intimes of wars, and in undemocratic countries like China and Iran, blogs have come toplay important roles as new independent media channels.

Blogs can also function assources of expertise on specific issues for general as well as specialized journalists,

and political journalists are searching daily rankings of blogs in order to find hot

E.g. Duval 2005; Grafström 2006; Kjaer et al. 2007.

Tunstall 1996, p. 354.

Gavin 1998; Lindhoff and Mårtensson 1996; Tunstall 1996, pp. 354-373.

E.g. Hvitfelt and Nygren 2005.

Kline 2005, pp. 249-250.

Kline 2005, p. 244.

E.g. Lawson-Borders and Kirk 2005; Tremayne 2007.

Herring et al. 2007.

Stattin 2005.

Drezner and Farrell 2004.

stories and information to develop into news features.

As a consequence of thisdevelopment it is apt to assume that blogs play important roles also in other journalistic genres.Despite the expansion of business news and media’s increasingly important role asagenda-setter in corporate life,

research on the processes of production of businessnews is still an underdeveloped area of research.

A recent study on how popularity iscreated through corporations that are highlighted as “celebrity firms” in media contentasks for more research un-wrapping the journalistic processes behind the news inorder to understand how celebrity firms are actually created.

Considering this lack of news production studies in the field of business news and the development of newtechnology, in this paper, we enlighten the news producing process from theperspective of the interplay between media and news sources by analyzing how newtechnology influences these processes. In this paper we raise the question of what rolenew technology, in particular blogs, plays in business news production.By exploring the relationship between blogs and business journalists the aim is toprovide insights that further develop our understanding of news production. This paperexplores if and in what ways blogs influence the production of business news. How dobusiness journalists perceive and use blogs?

Studying business journalism and the role of blogs

The paucity of research about business news production and blogs makes this studynecessary explorative. The paper builds on three sub-studies: 1) a pre-study consistingof informative interviews; 2) a quantitative survey among business journalists; and 3)a content analysis of articles about blogs in the business press. Below we present thesethree sub studies.

Pre-study of informative interviews

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 us with important insights and knowledge about blogsand their relationship with mainstream media. The pre-study started by an interviewwith a business developer who analyses the possibilities to observe and monitor blogsfor corporate clients. He recommended us to contact a today well-known blogger inthe Swedish blogosphere with a journalistic background. At this interview, as well asat the subsequent interviews, we asked the respondents for other key persons who arewell informed about the Swedish blogosphere. In this way we conducted in totalfourteen interviews, of which nine interviewees were active bloggers, two wereexperienced journalists, and two were PR/media analysts (see Appendix 1).Nine of the interviews were personal interviews (face-to-face), two wereconducted over the phone, and one was conducted over e-mail. The personalinterviews and the phone interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1 ½ hours. Theresults of the pre-study were of significance for designing the rest of the study, and forthe development of a survey to business journalists in particular.

Lawson-Borders and Kirk 2005.

E.g. Carroll and McCombs 2003.

Deephouse et al. 2003; Johansson 2004; Machin and Niblock 2003.

Rindova et al. 2006.