Frank Barnako, media critic at CBSMarketwatch, has done his autopsy of bloggers and the election. Barnako viewed Election Day coverage, weighing the impact of bloggers and traditional media. He compared the pre-election claims of bloggers to what post-election data revealed. The results are not impressive.
WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) — No one reads blogs.
Oops! I did it again. Better get under my desk before the e-mail flames arrive.
But when the most popular political blog draws less than 270,000 visitors on Election Day, you've got to ask, "What's the point?" (More traffic reports below.)
"How dare you say such a thing?" "What about the 4 million blogs Technorati is tracking?" "What about the fact that 11 months ago RSS was a geek secret and now it's a bolt-on to My Yahoo?" "What about the 100 million page impressions a month Blogads.com says it delivers?"
All that may be true. It's just that after the presidential election, it appears to me that the only readers of blogs ... are bloggers! They are a good group. Educated and engaged. But they're also like mice in a rotating cage: running in place, bumping into the same old people.
Despite all the anti-Bush screeds on Web logs, the frequent priming of wordy bonfires with Bush's National Guard duty records, the rush to judgment about missing explosives in Iraq ... it just didn't matter. All those opinions. All that Internet buzz. So little impact. Could it be not even bloggers trust what they read on blogs?
. . .Bottom line: Political blogging is like Ralph Nader. Nobody pays attention.
Barnako is more right than not. I've often lamented the echo chamber nature of the blogosphere. Much too often political blogging consists of a trip to Atrios or Daily Kos, if you're allegedly liberal, followed by a more or less verbatim regurgitation of whatever he is saying that day. (And, don't forget the banner. I think it is supposed to read 'reality based' now. Heck. My blog has been reality based all along. And, no one had to tell me to make it that way.) A conservative blogger? Same regimen, only the big bloggers leading the sheep around by the nose are the InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs. I can't think of any reason such behavior would result in insights into the minds of the electorate. If anything, it is guaranteed to reinforce what the bloggers participating already believe and get those who haven't conformed to do so. Blogs are — when not stagnating at least — evolving. So, before the election of 2008 rolls around, it is possible they may come to play some meaningful role in disseminating useful information to a more than miniscule share of the electorate. But, for now, voters either don't know or don't care what bloggers have to say.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - RJ
"when the most popular political blog draws less than 270,000 visitors on Election Day"
I guess he excluded Drudge...
2 - boomcrashbaby
voters either don't know or don't care what bloggers have to say.
I wonder if the media will keep paying attention to bloggers? Wasn't it bloggers that were credited with Rathergate? And I'm sure that CBS fiasco influenced some votes.
I've often lamented the echo chamber nature of the blogosphere.
There is definitely an echo chamber, but what I've noticed is that other people will offer their own perception or additional info/links that weren't included originally. Each echo is an embellishment, but yeah, it needs serious work to make the situation better, I agree with you.
Much too often political blogging consists of a trip to Atrios or Daily Kos, if you're allegedly liberal, followed by a more or less verbatim regurgitation of whatever he is saying that day.
This is true. Most of the comments on Atrios's site (each thread can have several hundred comments), are actually conversations between people though. Atrios isn't so much a news place as it is a coffee house type political conversation and/or strategizing going on (complete with Republican trolls trying to disrupt things).
It's a gathering place, at least that is how I see it. If it makes you feel better, I often blog with Keith Olbermann, the Daily Show or MadTV's Weekend Update on in the background. :-)
Seriously though, I think it is a great way to hear what other people have to say, watching a news reporter on tv, you just don't get the pulse of what people think. Going to left AND right blogs, you do. News of an injustice is one thing, but how people react to that injustice is what determines the course of events from there on out. And people don't always react correctly as I have been made painfully aware of, recently.
I can get a better picture of how the right feels about something by reading their blogs, instead of letting Bill O'Reilly tell me how they feel.
Also, tv news can take an hour to present what you can read in 5 minutes on a blog. You can skip all the commercials and fluff. I use blogs as links to news, rather than news.
And most importantly, I think that before we as liberals disregard the power of political blogging, which does need a serious overhaul, we need to examine just exactly how effectively the right has used blogging this last election as a way to disseminate information. Blogging can be very powerful and we should look at ways to make it more effective. Trust me, the Right sure is.
3 - RJ
The Blogosphere does not need a "serious overhaul." That would require regulation from a central power.
What makes the Blogosphere so powerful is its unregulated nature.
If you are wise enough to be able to seperate the wheat from the chaff, then you're okay. And if you aren't wise enough to do so, you probably aren't reading Blogs anyway...
4 - boomcrashbaby
The Blogosphere does not need a "serious overhaul." That would require regulation from a central power.
I wasn't even thinking along those lines. I was thinking of bloggers working together to make it a more effective tool. Blogs on the left are abuzz with the concept.
5 - Mac Diva
Steve (Boom), I began my blogging career as a guest blogger for several liberal bloggers, including Atrios. The disrespect for anyone other than a select few showing any evidence of having a brain irritated me from the beginning. Having always been an independent person, I saw through the scrim quickly. I decide what interests me, what I think and what I will say, not anyone else.
Furthermore, a lot of those people are just plain phony. For example, a person who aids and abets racists is not a liberal. Yet, that kind of hypocrisy is rampant in the 'liberal' blogosphere. What one really sees with that set is people looking for other folks as shameless as themselves. The feedback from the election proves what I've thought all along -- they're engaged in an exercise of mutual mental masturbation.
To say or do anything that is not merely fodder for the echo chamber, a blogger must be independent.
6 - boomcrashbaby
The feedback from the election proves what I've thought all along -- they're engaged in an exercise of mutual mental masturbation.
Yeah, I get your complaint, and I can see it's prevalence in the blogs, I do think they need to be overhauled - the political ones anyway. But I think this election showed them what you've been thinking all along. That they really were engaging in mutual mental masterbation. It reads to me now though, like the bloggers want to change that. (the commenters though, haven't realized it yet, many of them sound like this was their first election to be politically aware. I assume they are mostly very young). I do hope that the left can make political blogging as powerful a tool as the right does, because one thing is for sure, in the battle for my equal rights, I sure can't count on my own community.
7 - Mike Kole
Mac- It's that independence you site that will make blogs increasingly relevant over time. It is the controlled nature- or at least the suspected controlled nature- of major media, by corporate interests, those biased under cloak, etc., that chips at the relevance of the major media. Boom is right to cite Rathergate as a prime example.
In my estimation, blogs will follow much the same path as other media have in that some will establish themselves as dominant, trusted players, while others will fade away or remain relatively insignificant players.
That blog sites are hosted for free merely ensures that there will be more of them to wade through.
8 - Greg Smyth
I think he's missing the point. It's not really how many people are reading blog, just who. And the answer is mainstream Big Media. The big blogs are already influencing the news agenda. If the media didn't think they were important in this respect why would they publish a slew of pieces by and about bloggers? The Guardian in the UK has already gone to town on Salam Pax and the guy from Kos was a regular columnist leading up to the US election. Blogs are a quick and easy was for notoriously lasy Big Media to find out what Joe Public thinks and is talking about (and all without having to leave their desks). I think that's how blogs influence things... feel free to disagree.
9 - Mac Diva
Greg, my first career was in big media. I don't think the news values of journalism have transferred to blogs well. Yes, there is a minority of bloggers who grasp the difference between fact and opinion. Some who actually do some research. A few who write well. But, check their backgrounds. Ages ago, before Kos went public, he and I joked about 'secret' reporters. Bloggers would be all over reporters, but the best blogging was being done by. . .you guessed it. So far, it is mainly a one-way street. When the blogosphere produces a Josh Marshall who is not a journalist, I will be impressed.
Steve (Boom), the circle of bloggers I communicate with regularly try to add something to the information already available in the mainstream media. Sometimes, that just means pulling sources together so one gets a coherent take on a topic instead of the typical slapdash. Or, writing analysis. Other times, it is providing information about, for example, the 'fathers movement' or civil rights history. If one has an area of expertise, such as music or writing, it means writing about the craft. (You'd be surprised how many bloggers can't write something as easy as a book review.) But, most blogging is just echoing material from big media or another blog.
I regularly explore new blogs and am surprised to see how often they are just repetitions of the mediocrity the blogosphere is already overrun with. I must have looked at hundreds of new 'blogs for Bush,' with the requisite mockery of Teresa Heinz Kerry's appearance and touting of the Swift Nuts. The world needs more of that like it needs a bigger hole in the ozone layer.
Then there is the matter of focus. From a news perspective, the confirmation of what happened in that village by the Vietnamese who lived there when Nightline sent reporters to trace John Kerry's footsteps is much more signficant than whether someone fed Dan Rather inaccurate information. Yet, in the blogosphere, the real news story got short shrift.
We'll know whether blogs develop into something worthy of the attention of more than the four percent of Internet users who frequent them by 2008. One way we will know is by whether they are read by more people. Another will be whether they influence the people who read them.
10 - Eric Olsen
I'm not entirely sure blogs need the benediction of household name Frank Barnako for their validation. I would say that he is bothering to condemn based upon media-induced expectations rather speaks for itself.
And his traffic figures are WAY off - Site Meter shut down for half of election day due to being overwhelmed with traffic - its figues could be off as much as 50% for some sites.
Regardless, there is no way around the fact that the most popular blogs get traffic very comparable to mainstream media, in fact making them very much part of hte mainstream media, and collectively their traffic is enormous.
As everyone else has said, the key is to sort the wheat from teh chaff, find original voices, or those who point you where you want to go, and you have, at minimum, a very important supplement to he mainstream media.
11 - Mac Diva
The old 'my speedometer isn't working' dodge, eh? I hope they didn't try that alibi. It is too pitiful.
. . .the most popular blogs get traffic very comparable to mainstream media.
Not remotely accurate. Let me guess that he who says much, but knows little will try to wiggle out of this by claiming he means web sites for mainstream media. But, the web site for a newspaper, magazine or television show is a tiny part of its audience. More people view the test pattern for a major television station than read the highest traffic weblogs combined.
Barnako isn't lying. He is presenting facts instead of hype. That some people prefer hype shows them to be hopelessy shallow. Which, not so incidentally, is a major problem with bloggers.
12 - boomcrashbaby
You'd be surprised how many bloggers can't write something as easy as a book review.
Actually, no I can see it quite easily. I am trying to review gay-themed movies (not porn) on my blog and I want what I write to be good, so it takes me forever. It's tough to write something good. Now when I write about my family and share our family experiences with the world, that just comes easy, that part is like a diary, that's not reporting. And with those interested in reading, that's where the community feel comes from, and we share our rants about trying to raise children in a country that is overtly hostile to our families. THAT is where my real fondness of blogging comes from, outside of, yet not completely removed from the political blogging.
13 - Anita Campbell
Measuring traffic on election day is a fool's comparison.
On election night (which is the only time of that day that mattered for me), I was glued to the USAToday election results site and other election results sites, plus TV.
I wouldn't even think of looking to a blog -- any more than I would look to a traditional pundit site or even most traditional news sites such as the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. They don't pretend to give minute by minute reportage -- they have other purposes.
I mean, would you have logged onto the Wall Street Journal on election night to find out what was happening with the vote on a minute by minute basis? No. But does that prove that no one reads the Wall Street Journal? No.
Results were coming in too fast to wait for them to be filtered through a commentator other than one with the infrastructure set up to handle minute by minute reporting. The only thing that counted were the handful of sites that had maps and reported voting results by precinct and state, as they were coming in. And the TV commentators who were getting updates in their ear plugs minute by minute from their election results desks. But I certainly wasn't waiting for Maureen Dowd or Charles Krautheimer to whip up a column in order to find out who won.
On election day, TV and the election results sites had the edge. But that proves nothing for the other 364 days of the year.
14 - Mac Diva
Ain't buyin' it. There are empirical measures of whether a form of media has readers and influence. They all support what Barnako found. Blogs are little read and not influential. The Pew study was even more explicit. Of the four percent of Internet users who read blogs, many of those do so because a family member or friend has a blog, or, they are bloggers themselves. That supports what Boom (Steve) says about finding community for a viewpoint in blogging. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that too many bloggers have an inflated sense of what they are doing. If the nature of blogging changes, the measures will pick that up. But for now, there is a lot of unearned chest thumping going on.
15 - Mike Kole
On my blog, I had a run-up of hits before the election, and a steady level for a week after, then a tail-off.
16 - Eric Olsen
Actually, Barnako is LESS right than not. By any reasonable measure, blogs are very influential and have demonstrably affected and altered mainstream media coverage in style and content.
The media itself reads them, and many bloggers ARE members of the mainstream media - there is all kinds of cross-pollination going on right now - it isn't either/or, for most of the most popular and influential blogs it's a matter of both.
The real questions are these: is blog traffic going up? Has the average person who follows the mainstream media at all been exposed to the existence of blogs over the last 6 months or so? Does blog content influence mainstream media content? Have blogs become financially viable over the last year or so? Do search engines take blogs seriously?
The answer to all these questions and many more indicative of influence, importance and "success" is YES.
17 - BB
I've tried unsuccessfully (twice) to ping this post, so hence this comment. I think you will enjoy reading this article by Douglas Kern who fisks Eric Engberg's diatribe bemoaning Bloggers during the 2004 presidential election.
According to Doug "It's an uncommonly terrible article, even by CBS standards."
So let the fisking begin!
18 - Mac Diva
By any reasonable measure, blogs are very influential and have demonstrably affected and altered mainstream media coverage in style and content.
Then present a 'reasonable measure' that supports your position, Eric Olsen. You won't. . .because there aren't any. All the measuring systems say blogs have a very limited audience. The most indepth study, Pew's, says about 11 percent of Internet users have heard of the blogosphere. Only about four percent actually use it. And, we're talking about people who are regularly online. The 40-plus percent of citizens who either don't have regular Internet access or don't use it is not even being counted. There is a group of hobbyists, basically, who publish and browse blogs. But, they compose a smaller population than even stamp collectors.
19 - RJ
"I began my blogging career as a guest blogger for several liberal bloggers, including Atrios."
Why doesn't he link to your site?
20 - Mac Diva
Something to do with comformity and the echo chamber one would suspect. However, I stopped linking to him first. A person who refuses to criticize racism when people responsible for it hide behind 'I'm a liberal' is just another hypocrite in my opinion. Since then Atrios has seen quite a few of his illusions shattered -- which is a good thing.
21 - boomcrashbaby
RJ, probably because she's been criticizing his blog?
According to The Truth Laid Bare, Mac Diva's Silver Rights blog is the 2,994th most linked to blog out of millions.
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosearch.php
22 - RJ
"Ages ago, before Kos went public, he and I joked about 'secret' reporters."
Why doesn't Kos link to your site, MD?
23 - Mac Diva
That's my little blog, Steve. The larger one, Mac-a-ro-nies, has proven remarkably tenacious despite efforts to drive thinking people of color from the blogosphere. No, it is not the top 100 blog it started out as, but readership is good.
My first clashes with Atrios occurred when I was his protege. One of them involved a blog entry I wrote about Democrats in the neo-Confederate movement. Atrios refused to run it. We had published plenty about conservatives and the neo-Confederate movement. (This was after the Trent Lott debacle.) But, when I wrote a piece describing how some white Democrats in the South, mainly, are also supporters of white supremacy, the answer was 'we can't run that.' The episode was one of a pattern of hypocrisy. But, I am not here to pick on any particular blogger. My point in regard to the liberal blogosphere in general is that it has too many phonies in it. Perhaps the absence of sincerity partly explains the lack of readership and support.
24 - Mac Diva
You mean: 'Why don't you ink to Kos' site?' right?
25 - boomcrashbaby
oh, I spelled it wrong, that's why it didn't show up. Mac-a-ro-nies is around number 1,500 of the most linked to blogs. Considering there are millions of blogs, I would say both blogs are exceptionally good!