Journalism goes social: The hesitant adoption of blogs. A study into the use of blogs among Dutch newspaper journalists

The rise of social media requires a different approach from the traditional newspaper industry towards (online) journalism. Newspapers have to reinvent their medium and the way they communicate with their readers. To (re)connect with readers, newspaper websites have started to incorporate blogs into their websites. Though blogs were first not seen as a journalistic medium, some Dutch media have changed their minds. A qualitative content analysis of 106 journalist blogs embedded in Dutch newspaper websites, executed in October 2010, revealed that journalists blogs are not widespread. From the thirteen online newspapers, only seven had incorporated journalist blogs. Dutch news-paper journalists did not use the medium to its fullest social potential. A majority of the blogging journalists had adopted some sort of personal style and half of the journalists sometimes initiated discussions, but more could be done to increase interaction with the audience and more web technology could be used to make the blog more attractive and user-friendly. Moreover, it seems that the journalist bloggers use their blogs more as an extra news platform, rather than a platform for direct interaction between journalists and their audiences. They provoke discussions within the public sphere, that way connecting readers to a medium, but mostly journalists do not actively engage in these discussions themselves. It will be argued that this hesitant adoption of social media illustrates the risk-averse nature of newspapers. Their current behaviour shows similarities with the past when newspapers also responded slowly to the arrival of new media such as the television.