Why (Belgian) Journalists Blog

Gothenburg.
Oops, got into the next AoIR 2010 session a little late (why are the coffee breaks so short?), and Mathieu Simonson is already in full flight. This is a paper on motivations for blogging, which engaged in interviews with journalist-bloggers to examine why they were blogging.

Key motivations identified here were personal autonomy: escaping professional routines and professional limitations, e.g. by publishing niche journalism or posting more politically biased commentary; self-development: learning and innovation – though notably not engaging in first-hand field research; self-promotion: personal branding, differentiation, and marketing, which also draws on the next activity; community interaction: discussion and collaboration with readers, to gain feedback and thus add further value to their work (in recognition that journalists are now operating in an exchange system in which the core currency is trust); and surveillance and information dispersal: monitoring discussions in online social spaces and attempting to ‘introduce journalistic rigour’ into online discussions (at least one of the journalists interviewed here also used his own – personal, anonymous – blog as a way to counteract the right-leaning content of his own news organisation by publishing more left-of-centre views).

The type of journalistic blogging which this study examined is a form of journalism that mainly developed in a context outside of journalistic organisations, so the motivations for such blogging were largely self-centred. That said, for the managers of media organisations it is also a form of promoting cheap or free labour, so some of them are promoting it as well.