Old and new media: Blogs in the third age of political communication

The Internet offers an unprecedented confluence of low cost production, distribution and marketing in a single publishing platform with minimal barriers to entry. At least in the USA, this distinctive political economy has seen an explosion of bottom-up, grassroots journalism and political discussion without the centralised direction, large-scale funding, and editorial control which are hallmarks of traditional news media. This paper explores the emergence of a ‘blogosphere’ which threatens to disturb, if it has not already ruptured, what Jay Blumler (2001, 204) describes as the ‘straightforwardly top-down’ character of mainstream political communication in which issues of the day are ‘mainly defined and discussed by politicians, journalists, experts and interest group leaders’. US bloggers have had an impact upon the established news media which extends well beyond driving them to publish their own j-blogs. In effect bloggers now constitute a ‘fifth estate’, fact-checking and—often obsessively—analysing the output of mainstream news media including its coverage of politics. In some cases bloggers have also shaped the course of political events by publicising issues originally overlooked by traditional news media. Yet in Australia the picture is rather different. In a different institutional setting blogging has not emerged as an important vehicle for political news and debate, nor even taken firm root. This would appear to pose a difficulty for the argument advanced by its champions that, with its particular political economy, the blogosphere is destined to transform political communication