Tempests of the Blogosphere: Presidential Campaign Stories that Failed to Ignite Mainstream Media. MIT. Retrieved 20 Sep 2005 from: http://web.mit

During the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, blogs came into their own as a political communications medium. For several years blog champions had promoted the narrative of indefatigable bloggers sniffing out under-the radar stories and challenging mainstream media. However, they were not widely recognized as playing a central journalistic role in the political communications system until blogs fact-checked CBS News ' memos regarding President Bush's National Guard Service. Credited with bringing about Dan Rather's retirement, "blog" became the most-searched-for definition online in 2004. But what of blog failures? Among the multitudes of bloggers and their torrents of posts, numerous relevant and engaging stories, such as the Sandy Berger archives theft and the Kerry intern scandal, whipped online muckrakers into a frenzy without achieving commensurate prominence in mainstream media. This paper combines anecdotal observations with findings from a content analysis of four leading political blogs during the last four months of the U.S. 2004 presidential election. Over 6,000 posts referencing the campaign were analyzed for original newsgathering as well as fact-checking other alternative and mainstream news sources across print and broadcast media. By contrasting popular topics in this sample with mainstream media coverage, this paper will identify stories that failed to cross over to mainstream media. Finally, drawing on mass-media news theories such as Gamson's collective action frames and Bennett's concepts of indexing and media strata, this paper will attempt to theorize common attributes of these "blogflops." Introduction: Civic Storie