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Public affairs blogs meet a need, fill a gapCOMMENTARY | November 313, 2011An academic study of public affairs blogs sheds light on how useful they can be to journalists looking for insight into communities, alternative views, and information on topics that are often overlooked by the mainstream media. By Brendan R. Watson The popularity of terms such as “citizen journalism” suggest that professional models and standards of reporting are the dominant lens through which citizen-produced media are understood. Understanding the value of phenomena such as local amateur public affairs blogs in this context, however, obscures the non-journalistic functions these sites can play in local communities. Among these functions, it appears that local public affairs blogs can be outlets for citizens to cope with the stress caused by living in communities with high levels of crime, poverty, and physical decay, where these blogs are most common. In the study I co-authored with Daniel Riffe, “Structural Determinants of Local Public Affairs Place Blogging: Structural Pluralism and Community Stress,” we found amateur local public affairs blogs — citizen-produced blogs about the public affairs of the city where the author lives — were more common in former rust-belt cities on the skids, with higher murder rates, poverty rates, and a greater percentage of aging homes, which may be indicative of physical decay (think rundown, boarded-up urban neighborhoods). Other researchers have linked these markers of “community stress” to increases in residents’ feelings of loneliness, hostility, and depression -- and to a greater tendency to withdraw from their communities. But while community stress generally decreases informal social interactions in a neighborhood, it can increase some communication and problem-solving activities, such as attending community meetings, letter-writing to the local media, etc. Public affairs blogging, as well, may be an outlet for residents to cope with crime, poverty, physical decay, and other problems. This community stress perspective explains why these sites cluster primarily in former rust-belt cities, can help journalists better understand the function these sites play in their communities, and can give journalists a window into the how residents are struggling with community problems. Although there is a fair amount of venting on these blogs, there are also instances of residents using them to organize petitions, protests, and letter-writing campaigns. Such task-oriented coping is more likely to produce newsworthy events that interest journalists. But residents’ emotional responses to community problems can meaningfully help residents cope with the symptoms of community stress, such as depression, and can also add color and context to reporting on community problems. Local politics, crime, and the economy are all topics local public affairs bloggers frequently write about, but so are local historic preservation, environmental problems, and alternative transportation. The last three topics are topics rarely covered by the traditional media. In fact, bloggers used original reporting most frequently when writing about historic preservation, which is a sub-topic represented by a number of comprehensive, well-written local blogs. Two examples of these historic preservation blogs are “Vanishing STL” in St. Louis, and “Endangered Durham” in Durham, N.C.. Sites that focus on specialized subtopics are potentially good sources for story ideas that extend beyond journalism’s typical fare and are a place to seek out potential sources already engaged in local issues. All this is not to suggest that residents in a city’s most violent, poorest neighborhoods are blogging about that city’s problems. Rather, we have found that better-educated professionals that live on the periphery of these worst-off neighborhoods are most likely those who go online to write about the community’s problems. So while our study suggests that local public affairs blogs may also be a useful tool for journalists to learn about and monitor issues that local residents are struggling with and that deserve media coverage, relying too heavily on online forums would exclude the most vulnerable, most affected portion of the population from one’s reporting. Finally, some journalists may well assume that much of the content on public affairs blogs is ripped off from the mainstream media. But in a second study, “Bloggers' Reliance on Newspaper, Online, and Original Sources in Reporting on Local Subjects Ignored by the Press,” I found that local public affairs bloggers rely on the traditional media — primarily newspapers, including affiliated websites — for fewer than a quarter of their sources. Combined, bloggers were actually more likely to rely on original sources (13.31%), such as original documents, and original reporting (11.04%), such as attending and writing about a local city council meeting. Furthermore, 66% of posts did not use a single traditional media source, and most posts citing the media also cited at least one other non-media source. Note: Brendan R. Watson is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The views expressed in this article are his only. They are not necessarily shared with his research collaborator, Dr. Daniel Riffe, the Richard Cole Eminent Professor at UNC. Their study “Structural Determinants of Local Public Affairs Place Blogging: Structural Pluralism and Community Stress” is forthcoming in the journal Mass Communication & Society. For more information about Brendan’s research, visit http://brendanwatson.net.
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