BUZZ, BLOGS, AND BEYOND: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 Michael Cornfield Senior Research Consultant Pew Internet & American Life Project
[email protected] Jonathan Carson President and CEO BuzzMetrics
[email protected] Alison Kalis Senior Analyst
[email protected] Emily Simon Analyst
[email protected] 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY BuzzMetrics and Dr. Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, studied the impact of political blogs on the national agenda during the last two months of the 2004 presidential campaign. (By political blogs, we mean only those few dozen blogs which are devoted to filtering public affairs news and which garner traffic in the tens of thousands.) Highlights: • The scandal known as “Rathergate” and other moments in the 2004 campaign enhanced the reputation of political blogs, bloggers, and the blogosphere –but blogger power, the capacity of blog operators to make buzz and influence decision-makers, is circumstantial: dependent on the sorts of information available, and contingent on the behavior of other public voices. • In our research, we charted the popularity of certain topics which attracted buzz (a lot of simultaneous talk) during the fall campaign across four channels of communication: blogs, citizen chat rooms, the mainstream media, and the national campaigns. The blog and citizen chat room channels were subdivided into conservative, general, and liberal groupings. No recurrent pattern indicative of unilateral blogger influence was detected. Political bloggers were buzz followers as much as buzz makers. • We also coded topics of discussion to see whether preferences in one channel or subdivision corresponded with those in the others.