Blogs on mainstream news sites: online lynch mobs or Habermassian digital cafés?

Across a range of disciplines-including journalism-there is widespread disagreement about the value of political blogs. Some scholars regard them as digital cafés of the virtual public sphere while others dismiss them as a platform for online lynch mobs spouting democracy, but spreading lies and invective. In this debate, blogs on mainstream media sites are ignored or dismissed, perhaps because of the view they are not genuine as they evidently fail to take advantage of the affordances of the blog format, such as hyperlinks and responding to readers. Consequently, a question seldom considered is the value of journalist-blogs and the extent to which they facilitate deliberation. My doctoral study looked at 13 political-blogs on News Limited and Fairfax sites, and a mixed-methods approach was used in which content analysis of comment-threads preceded interviews with selected journalists and editors. The results show on most blogs a small group dominates the conversation which means participation is not equally distributed. On a few the quality of conversation is further reduced by flaming and personal attacks as well as unreasonable or irrational statements. At the same time, there was also a high level of interactivity where a significant number of users challenged others’ viewpoints; none of the blogs could be described as an echo chamber. While veteran bloggers Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and David Penberthy no longer engage with readers, notably, a few are very interactive. There emerged clear distinctions between tabloid and broadsheet sites, with discussions on the latter more reasonable and civil-partly due to differences in moderation style. While some political conversation has migrated to social media platforms, it is evident that blogs on mainstream newspaper sites still have a role, with the rise of Twitter helping to integrate them into societal news streams, rather than sounding a death knell."Blogs on mainstream news sites: online lynch mobs or Habermassian digital cafés?" is the title in the Conference Program, however the title of the presentation is "Blogging in the Mainstream: Journalist Blogs and Public Deliberation