Hi Bill D. - It's Susannah [not Susan!] here from the blogosphere project (all the blog postings are mine). Thanks for the note and your openness to questions. I have one! Feel free to respond in the blogs somewhere or either to email me (s3schmid@ryerson.ca) as I would really appreciate any further thoughts you have on the project, the issues raised in journalism or as a reporter, but particularly the reserach blog and the "being watched" as you say. The blogroll and the definition of what blogs we’d like to read and include in the study has just taken shape in the past couple of weeks. My decision to post it was based on wanting to be more transparent – but perhaps it’s not enough? My thinking was that in posting a blogroll, those who are interested in knowing who read them would see that a link was created, and would go to the research blog. But do you think that’s inadequate? In your view, should Abby and I should email all the bloggers on the blogroll and let them know that we’re reading their blogs for research purposes? I must admit, some of why I didn’t push for this was not in fact that I didn’t recognize the great and daring work out there, but more because I didn’t want to presume that people would have any interest in it, and in visiting my little peanut gallery research area at a J-school. But based on what you said I am re-evaluating this...maybe a sense of shyness prohibited me from weighing questions in a more aware way...

Thanks Bill – I hope to hear back. By the way, I had hoped to try to meet you when my TV teacher (Peter McNelly) took a few of us to CTV for a tour in June but it was overwhelming (in a good way)! We had the chance to go to an evening news meeting– it was really neat to see how this happened at CTV and to realise that the sorts of fights we had in Peter’s class were the same kinds of fights people are having about real news.

I'm going to post this on our blog to keep track of it.

Susannah

Hi Susannah (Agghh! My apologies about the name screw-up):

I can offer further thoughts on your project at some point, but here are some quick ones.

Contacting the bloggers directly might be useful. If you're blogging, you probably buy into the transparency/news as conversation model of journalism to at least some degree.

And really, unless people are clicking on the links, they won't necessarily be detected by peoples' blogs, depending on the stats software they have (I became aware of your project's blog by a chance Technorati search. I'm not in your blogroll. :) ).

You might want to post a note to Canadian Journalist explaining about your project and reach out to other parts of the blogosphere.

Another thing is to what part of the blogosphere do you intend to concentrate on? For taxonomic purposes, I like to think about the blogiverse, then various spheres and subspheres within that.

For example: blogiverse\canadian political blogs\progressive.

I would love to know which political blogs are followed most intently by media bloggers and vice versa.

I suspect research will show it's all a fairly compact, self-referencing group.

For that reason, I would love you to identify some solid bloggers who don't get linked to and find out why that is. If the blogosphere can't help interesting new voices emerge, what can?

Another question is to what extent have blogs enhanced the news output of columnists and reporters who have them.

As I've said, the CTV.ca stories I've done haven't generated much in the way of comment either good, bad or indifferent.

Another question is how many mere MSM reporters have blogs versus columnists who do?

Those are a few thoughts.

While I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to meet, I'm glad you enjoyed your tour of CTV and that a visit to the afternoon news meeting showed there isn't that big a gulf between professional and student news decision-making. :^)

Hi Bill – thanks for your thoughts. We’ll be contacting people in the next week and a half with hopes of inviting survey participants – right now we’re getting the kinks out of survey monkey (the online survey tool) with the help of some survey testers and I’m working on French translations.

The transparency/ news as conversation question is a crucial and weird one. I definetly do buy into it, but what happens when modernist social scientific research aims meet new technology and the political hope for collaborative and transparent research or collectivist articulations of meaning...I suppose this question is really the same as how journalism changes under similar historical and technological factors.

In the “older school” methods we would never have a blog up tracking our research as we go and inviting commentary – it would all be squirreled away until—viola— publication. Abby is the hard core academic between the two of our brains, and she is tapped into networks of thinkers who “approve” of these kinds of research methods as evolving with culture, but as you know, in more traditional circles that kind of methodology would be anathema, dismissed as amateurish or plain foolhardy.

These issues applied to the daily practice of journalism -- you mention the interesting issue of column writing versus reporting and the use of blogs. That is something we hope to be able to report on after the study. So far it seems to me that there are very, very few "hard" (do these old terms still apply?) news reporters in Canada using a blog (mostly column / feature writers -- but again, perhaps I simply haven't been able to find them, or they don't want to be found). That would fit with a hypothesis a number of journalists have suggested, that many "hard news" reporters would find blogging too much to jeapordize their professional status as non-partisan / autonomous. It's definetly a debate around here among J-schoolers starting out.

I'm sure as you and your colleagues would have some fascinating perspectives about the potential impact on reporting or the configuration of what is news and how's it made. Our study will be looking mostly at a) how people understand what they are doing and b) connections between blogs & networks in the Cdn. media context.

I see some other issues about the transparency value as well – can blog readership really be transparent when the kind of readership that responds to it probably doesn’t necessarily understand itself as a community unless it has another (personal or professional) relationship? And how can a person identify the kind of context they are responding in when a blog is such a public format – despite the fact that one feels it to be private? And there's volume -- if a blog gets even 100 hits a day, does that blogger really want 100 people commenting on items to make themselves known?

To me it raises these interesting issues about how norms of dialogue and community take shape even when they are not articulated – who feels invited to “speak,” and when; also, issues you rightly raise, like who is acknowledged (linked to) and when?

Your question “If the blogosphere can’t help new interesting voices emerge, what can?” also captures my attention. I think this question is really at the crux not only of who’s heard, but also the meaning of all this to communication, and a democratic public sphere (if the public / private configuration is still meaningful…that’s another framework that seems split open).

Do you know of this fellow Clay Shirky – he argues that online, “diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality” ().
U.S. political scientists Drezner & Farrell likewise argue based on network analsysis that “[n]odes that are rich in ties are likely to become even richer over time.” Applied to the social sphere...? That study found 120 American media elites read the same top 10 blogs. We won't have that kind of focus of blog reading habits, but we will be looking at blog linkages and the different spheres.

HOWEVER – this is awfully long!! I’m glad you caught that you were on our blogroll as I thought you were. And it’s a great idea to post to CJ (you work on that, non?) and other sites to try to invite the widest net of individual journalist-bloggers in Canada. The amazing thing to me is how darned hard it is to find people if you don't know where to begin -- more accessibility and visibility issues.

Thanks again, hope to chat / e-chat again further into the study.

Susannah