School of Journalism

Though political bloggers are often caricatured in the media as lone voices, their blogs provide virtual spaces for their readers to discuss politics and organize political action. The new expressive and participatory opportunities made available by the Internet in general and blogs in particular will only become more important to the political process as the number of people making use of them increases. At the same time that blogs have become an important part of the political landscape, ideological media in general have seen a rise in prominence. In this paper, we seek to examine the relationship between the ideological homogeneity of one's blog consumption and the tendencies to participate in and discuss politics.

Recently, Twitter has become a prominent part of social protest movement communication. This study examines Twitter as a new kind of citizen journalism platform emerging at the aggregate in the context of such "crisis" situations by undertaking a case study of the use of Twitter in the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. A corpus of more than 775,000 tweets tagged with #wiunion during the first three weeks of the protests provides the source of the analyses. Findings suggest that significant differences exist between users who tweet via mobile devices, and thus may be present at protests, and those who tweet from computers. Mobile users post fewer URLs overall; however, when they do, they are more likely to link to traditional news sources and to provide additional hashtags for context. Over time, all link-posting declines, as users become better able to convey first-hand information. Notably, results for most analyses significantly change when restricted to original tweets only, rather than including retweets.

Twitter has been cited as a key factor behind a number of recent protest movements. Through interviews with heavy users of the #wiunion hashtag, this study examines the motivations and perceptions behind its usage during the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. Findings suggest these users see a blurred boundary between citizen journalism and activism, but that their Twitter behavior is driven in part by distrust of traditional news sources and a desire to present an alternative. Notably, most do not see themselves as citizen journalists because they see journalism as an institutional, rather than individual, practice. Their orientation toward information credibility also diverges from traditional journalism, relying on interpersonal trust and the availability of visual evidence. These findings are discussed in the broader context of protest mobilization through information gathering and sharing.

Sports fan blogs provide key new outlets for fan engagement with live games and with each other. This study examines how and how much fans became engaged with discussion of live baseball games in 2012, across 16 SBNation.com blogs. Three areas of influence are examined -team-related and schedule-related pre-game factors, and ingame factors. Results show team success and weekday game attract new discussion participants, while high scoring and weekend games prompt the most extensive participation. Incentives for Beginning and Continuing Discussion in Baseball Blogs! 2! On the afternoon of September 9, 2012, the Houston Astros entered their game against the Cincinnati Reds with a record of 43-96, limping toward the end of a second consecutive 100-loss season. While the Astros were winning in Cincinnati, the Houston Texans were opening their 2012 NFL season at home with a win over the Miami Dolphins in pleasant late-summer weather. In the Houston television market, the broadcast of the Texans' game averaged 485,127 households; the Astros' game averaged just 1,092, for a 0.05 Nielsen rating (Barron, 2012). The Astros' miniscule audience is certainly an outlying case, the result of a number of factors relating to both the team and the individual circumstances of the September 9 game. Football is more popular than baseball in Texas, and the 2012 Texans were a much better team than the 2012 Astros. On a nice Sunday afternoon, there are many other ways to spend one's time than watching baseball, even if one chooses not to watch football. For those few Houstonians who did engage with the game, identifying some of the influences on that decision, as well as on the extent of their engagement with the game, could be particularly valuable for teams, broadcasters, advertisers, and fan communities with an interest in how fans attend to live sporting events.

Despite the attention given to political blogs in recent campaigns, scholars have often overlooked something without which they could not thrive: readers. Moreover, literature has considered that readers have generally done so without taking account of significant differences between conservative and liberal blogs. This study uses panel data collected during the 2008 U.S. election to examine how conservative, liberal, and non-blog readers differ. Results show little demographic difference between readers and non-readers. However, blog readers consume political media that is aligned with their blog use. Blog readers participate more in politics than non-readers as a result of their blog use, particularly readers of liberal blogs. Finally, blog readers exhibit greater political sophistication than non-readers, and develop greater political interest as a result of blog reading.