Citizen Journalism: Trend or Hype?
The Center for Citizen Media has a nice summary of a just released survey by Hsing Wei of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government entitled The Hype vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News. This survey gives us a deeper insight into the growing trend of blogging. The blog summarizes the profile of a typical blogger and their reasons for participating in blogging (whether passively or actively).
Here is a summary of interesting numbers from the survey:
- Blogging is a male phenomenon. 87% of respondents were male. This is pretty logical as technology blogs such as Slashdot were the first of its kind to emerge. Typically, technology appeals to males (at least, initially). Thus, the greater male readership numbers (initially). However, I feel as more and more things get included into the blogsphere this ratio will definitely make an adjustment.
- Blogging is a typically for the younger age group. 52% of bloggers are in the 22-34 age group. This is probably because of this age group is more open to new technology. A caveat is that these differences are specific to a site and not content. This is probably true because people tend to latch onto particular sites and read any content produced by that site (ie. Digg).
- Bloggers are responsive and tend to contribute to blogs they monitor. 89% of readers visit their favorite blog sites daily and all of them read the articles while 94% read the comments. A good 62% actually contributed comments. Most likely smaller blogging sites tend to get better posting numbers than larger blog sites. This is likely because larger blog sites already have a large reader base and it is difficult to comment after a certain number have already been posted. For fear of being … “one voice in a flood of idiots.”
- Smaller number of bloggers are prompted by RSS. A tiny 7% of bloggers visit sites because of RSS summaries. Does this mean that RSS is an ineffective way of promoting blogs? Or maybe this is because the summaries are typically enough?
- Blogs are sources of news you can’t get anywhere. 60.1% of responded with this reason for reading blogs. This is an expected result since blogs carry a good deal of commentary from the original poster and other users. Like-minded people tend to give information relevant to like-minded folk. Also a statistically significant 84.7% of respondents responded that they read blogs for personal interest and entertainment. This makes blogging more a past activity time than work.
- A small group of readers say they do not post because of logistical reasons. This group (roughly 4% of respondents) blame the actual inability to post as their reason for not posting. Possible reasons can probably include registration requirements, complete forms, faulty capchas and others. Most of these are anti-spam features on most major blog sites.
- Diversity is real. A good 16% of respondents categorically state that the strength of blog sites is in its diversity of topics. I would also like to add that even if the topics are diverse it is the like-mindedness of the readers and posters that keep the community together.
Definitely, this is interesting stuff. More tidbits and interested facts can be obtained from the actual survey. It gives us a better insight on the general blogging phenomenon. However, it is also stated in the survey that bloggers in some communities tend to behave radically differently. So, I believe that this is not the exception but the growing trend. As the blogsphere grows in diversity, the behavior of community will slowly by slowly start to reflect reality. Reality is pretty diverse.
