The hesitant adoption of blogs

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M ASTER T HESIS

Journalism goes social:

The hesitant adoption of blogs

A study into the use of blogs among Dutch newspaper journalists

Degree programme: Master Journalism,

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Unit of study: Master thesis

Lecturers: dr. T.S. Graham dr. A.R.J. Pleijter Date: April 20, 2011

Nicole Besselink S1623583 Hoge Maat 4 7625 ND Zenderen 06 1326 2865

n.t.m.besselink@student.rug.nl

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“In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker.”

Malcolm Gladwell (2006) Writer for The New Yorker

“If you want to be a multimedia organization, you have to make sure that your journalists start believing in it.”

Pieter Kok (2006) Publisher of de Volkskrant

“Blogs are here to stay […]. Just like teachers and journalists were at first negative about internet as a medium, now the weblog has ended up in the dock. We talk condescendingly about it, perceive it as a nasty fly that keeps on buzzing around our heads. Of course, we should have seen coming that this insect, just like the previous new medium, would settle quickly. Despite the vehement protests: the blog is here to stay.”

Erik van Heeswijk (2007) Vice-president at Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ)

“Letting newspaper journalists only work for the print version of the newspaper indicates little future-orientation; the online threatens the paper. News websites have proven that already. With the arrival of e-readers and tablets such as the iPad that threat only increases. On nrcnext.nl I sometimes write about tablet prototypes. The response of readers? They’re all enthusiastic.”

Ernst-Jan Pfauth (2010) Chief internet at NRC Media

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Abstract

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.

Keywords: journalist blogs – Dutch newspaper websites – online journalism – social media – communities – public sphere.

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Preface

Spring, I cannot imagine a better season to finish this master thesis in. Spring symbolizes the start of new things and summer is just around the corner. Before you get there you first have to get through the grey autumn and dark winter. That is quite the cycle this thesis went through. Last year at the end of summer the first vague contours of this study were marked.

In the wet autumn days the warm and convenient medical library opposite my house became my next best friend. I conducted the greater part of the analysis. But, winter arrived quicker than I thought and my instructive three-month internship at national daily Trouw started.

Journalism practice kept me away from journalism scholarship. It was not until the start of March that my thesis came out of the drawer again.

Now that trees start to blossom again, the work is done. After the autumn and winter, spring is in the air and the end of my study in sight. Just like spring is the forerunner of summer, I hope that this thesis and master in journalism will be the forerunners of an interesting career in journalism, whether it is in practice or in scholarship.

I owe many thanks to the people that supported me throughout the seasons. First, I would like to show my gratitude to my supervisor dr. Todd Graham. His enthusiasm about my research topic and research in general was very motivating, just like his support for my goal to write my thesis in three months time. Despite his busy schedule he always managed to give thorough, critical feedback on my work that gave me food for thought. I thank dr. Alexander Pleijter for co-advising.

In addition, I would like to thank my parents for their support throughout my studies and their unremitting belief in me. I thank Tirza and Elmar for their conscious and unconscious contributions to this thesis and Jasper for his feedback, his thinking along with me and continuous support. At last, I want to thank the staff of the medical library for only kicking me out once as I, being an arts student, am not actually allowed to study between the future doctors.

Nicole Besselink Zenderen, April 2011.

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List of tables and figures

Tables

1 Typology for blogs in general (Herring et al., 2004) 28 2 Typology for Dutch editorial blogs (Hermans and Pleijter, 2010) 28 3 Overview of 22 variables applied to the blog corpus 32 4 Overview of blog (author) characteristics per newspaper 33 Figures

1 Top Ten of Design Mistakes as listed by Nielsen (2005) 29 2 Age division of Dutch journalist bloggers per newspaper 34 3 Blog classification according to Herring et al. (2004) per

newspaper and in total 35

4 Blog classification according to Hermans and Pleijter (2010)

per newspaper and in total 35

5 Diagram of the three measured temporal characteristics

of journalist blogs 36

6 Blog activity and blog age per newspaper 37

7 The ten oldest journalist blogs 37

8 Presence of a clear-cut topic throughout the blog 39 9 Adoption of personal writing styles per newspaper 40 10 Level of conversation initiation by the journalist 43

11 Level of reader replies on blog posts 44

12 Use of multimedia at journalist blogs 46

13 Use of in-text hyperlinks in journalist blogs 48

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1. Introduction

1.1 Why study journalist blogs?

“I will admit it straightaway: I hardly read journalist blogs before this research. To put it more bluntly: I hardly read blogs in general before this research.” With these words I started the introduction of my research paper on user-generated content that I wrote for a research seminar last year. In that study I compared the newspaper and blog articles of six Dutch newspaper journalists to track differences and similarities.

This orienting study had aroused out of curiosity. I wondered why I hardly read journalist blogs. As a young news consuming student and journalist-to-be, blogs should appeal to me, I was told by media scholars. Up to that point, they did not, which made me wonder what was actually written on these web pages. How did the content differ from their newspaper articles? Do journalists actually become more personal and subjective on their blogs? What does this reveal ideologically?

Brainstorming about questions, the topic became more and more appealing.

However, the initial corpus of six journalists made it hard to draw general conclusions and answer my questions. Therefore I decided to take a closer look at journalist blogs by making them the topic of my master thesis. A hundred blogs were added to the corpus in order to address the question how journalists are blogging. Given the lack of empirical research on blog content – as opposed to studies on attitudes of journalists towards online journalism and studies on user-generated content options for web users – made it all the more interesting.

1.2 Background: Newspapers fear for extinction

If one studies the medium blog, it is helpful to look back at the arrival of new media in the past. The past shows that after every introduction of a new medium or social change, Dutch newspapers openly feared for their existence. When the traditional religious and socio-political barriers broke down (ontzuiling in Dutch) halfway through the sixties and newspapers consequently lost their comfortable, loyal readership, newspapers feared for their future. Simultaneously, television became a mass medium and developed into a competitor for newspapers once it started with news broadcasts. Though first more similar to a spoken newspaper, news broadcasts developed their own visual discourse over the years, attracting more and more viewers (Van Dijck, 2005:418). Television became a serious competitor for the newspaper.

It did not end with ontzuiling and television. In the last decades of the twentieth century, communication and information technologies made their entry. Computers and the internet offered a range of opportunities to store, distribute and exchange information endlessly and worldwide (Lichtenberg, 2005:428). The potential of these new technologies was enormous.

Dutch journalists held different opinions on these new technologies. Oosterbaan and Wansink (2008:63), for example, expect that free web editions of the newspaper will oust the paid paper version as subscribers will run away. In their book, ‘The Newspaper Must Choose’, they describe the rise of the internet as one of the changes that led to the end of the golden years in the newspaper industry. They attribute the decline of newspaper circulation figures also to three other changes in the relationship between readers and newspaper publishers: (1) news has become omnipresent; (2) interest in the common good has decreased as a result of increasing welfare and individualization; and (3) instead of enthusiastic publishers with intrinsic motives, more and more newspaper investors aim for quick profit maximalization and taking over newspaper businesses.

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9 Oosterbaan and Wansink are also skeptical and pessimistic about the possibilities of the internet as a quality news medium, just like some of their colleagues (Hermans and Pleijter, 2010:1). Keeping up close contact with the audience has proven to be an illusion in their eyes, just like the mobilization of the knowledge of readers and site visitors.

Other journalists, however, note that the future of newspapers might very well be on the web and they are not pessimistic about this (e.g. Gordon, 2005; Chavannes, 2007a;

Zagers, 2010; Pfauth, 2010).

According to Marc Chavannes, journalism professor and highly experienced journalist at NRC Handelsblad, journalists just have to get used to the idea that they will have to practice their trade online in the future. He argues that “[f]ew ‘old media’ have taken the bend towards profitable cyber journalism easily. Publishers and journalists are making a thorough search for an adapted formula, while standing on a decreasing territory”

(2007a:2). If these ‘old media’ want to survive, these journalists should, in his eyes, become more and more information mediators rather than all-knowing town messengers. The audience will decide for itself what it wants to read and view at what time. Chavannes thinks that explanation and interpretation could be journalism’s life jacket. “People will always have a need for assessment and hierarchy” (idem 4).

1.3 Journalistic blogging: A hesitant start

One way of mediating and assessing information – journalism’s ‘life jacket’ as Chavannes promotes it – is blogging, an online genre (Lasica, 2003a) that grew tremendously over the last decade. A blog is an easy-to-create web page with regularly updated information, commentary, and links of public interest, wide and narrow (based on Lowrey and Mackay, 2008:64; Blood, 2003; Grabowicz, 2003; Lasica, 2003a; Wall, 2004, 2005).

They are different from traditional static websites in that they are interactive and responsive, allowing visitors to leave comments and messages for each other via widgets (Matum and Wang, 2010). Moreover, they are more personal (Wheeler, 2009:7, Firpo et al. 2009:65).

The rise of blogs began at the end of the twentieth century. These personal web pages were made by all sorts or people and discussed all sorts of topics, from children to politics, from teenage adventures to science. At first, blogging was a hobby. Playing around with html codes was just for fun. A blog was often used as an online diary brightened up by photos, video and audio. In the Netherlands, Dutch profile website CU2 was one of the early successes of the blogging trend. Teenagers could design their own web page by editing html codes. They could embed photos, videos and audio and message each other. The blog site, aimed at Dutch youth, started in 2000 and contained 415.000 profiles of teenagers by May 2006; 22 percent of the entire age group of teenagers (Valkenburg and Schouten, 2006:587).

When more consumer friendly blog software such as Blogger (1999) and WordPress (2003) became available at the start of the twenty-first century, it became easier to start your own blog. More internet users were tempted to set up a (private) blog, including journalists. The journalistic potential of blogs was initially not seen. Only when successful news blogs emerged – first in the US, later in the Netherlands (e.g.

GeenStijl.nl) – traditional media felt the need to compete with this new online medium.

As a result, Dutch media began incorporating journalist blogs into their websites.¹ The arrival of journalist blogs on newspaper websites, must have raised questions at

1 With a journalist blog, a term that will be used throughout this report, a blog is meant that a newspaper journalist keeps up on the website of the medium that he or she works for. Thus, the term does not refer to the private blogs of journalists. The term ‘journalist blog’ and ‘blogging journalists’ will be used interchangeably.

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10 the internet desks of the newspapers and in the minds of chief editors and the blogging journalists. The web editors will have asked themselves on what web page the blogs should be published. ‘Do we put them on our opinion or news page or do we build a separate site? Also, do we allow readers to comment?’ Chief editors must have rethought the objectivity of their medium. That might become endangered when journalists blog too personally. ‘Do we not expose ourselves too much with these blogs?’, must have been a thought in the chief editor’s mind. Third, journalists must have wondered what they were going to write about and how they would write about it, as blog articles are different from newspaper articles.

That blogging journalists answered these latter questions in different ways, was shown in a recent study done by Hermans and Pleijter (2010:7-8). They found that Dutch journalists keep up six types of blogs: news blogs, opinion blogs, transparency blogs, report style blogs, backgrounds blogs and service blogs. Some blogs appeared to be a factual news blog whereas others were more focused on local reports and background stories.

Based on these findings, it seems that chief editors have not yet drawn up strict guidelines for their blogging journalists: different types of blogs can be written. The findings of Hermans and Pleijter’s (2010) findings also raise the question of whether journalists really keep up that many different types of blogs? And how do their blogs differ from a typical newspaper article? To what extent do newspaper journalists use web and blog tools on their blogs? How do they actually use their blog? In order to answer these questions, a brighter light needs to be shed on the use of journalist blogs.

Therefore, the following qualitative research questions have been formulated.

How do Dutch newspaper journalists make use of the journalist blogs they keep up on their newspaper’s website?

1. To what extent do Dutch newspaper journalists adopt a personal style on their blog?

2. To what extent do Dutch newspaper journalists interact with their audience?

3. To what extent do Dutch newspaper journalists blog according to web usability standards?

4. What can the web and blog skills of these journalistic bloggers tell us about Dutch newspaper journalism?

All five questions are relevant in an era in which internet and social media have undeniably become part of our world. The news consumer no longer solely consumes news in offline newspapers, magazines and television programs; it also consumes news online. If internet is indeed the future of journalism, as often is being propagated, adaptation and development of an online discourse seems essential if traditional journalism wants to survive. Just like television had to invent a visual discourse for itself, it now seems time for written journalism to reinvent itself online.

If internet technology is here to stay, traditional, offline media cannot stay ashore to watch the internet ship pass by. Offline media better jump on the ship as it sets the course for a new media landscape. By examining to what extent newspaper blogs contain personal style, interaction and web usability, claims can be made about the state of affairs in the Dutch newspaper business and, if you like, the likelihood that a newspaper will make a successful jump on to the internet ship.

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11 Put in other words, this study aims to find out whether newspaper journalists (will) easily cross the ocean from offline to online.² If basic web and blog principles such as interaction, multimedia, hypertextuality and (a)synchronization (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001) are abundantly used, one could say there is hope. However, when journalist blogs turn out to be mainly ‘online newspapers’ (just like the first news broadcasts were spoken newspapers) with print content literally copied to the website, traditional newspaper journalists still have a long way to swim before they get to the other side of the ocean.

1.4 Outline

This thesis reports how Dutch journalists use their journalist blogs, based on a qualitative content analysis of 106 blogs. The report is presented as follows. In Chapter 2 the history of the Dutch newspaper industry from its acceleration in 1869 until the current online revolution of the twenty-first century will be described to see how the newspaper industry has faced challenges in the past. This historical chapter offers the theoretical framework in which the research findings will fit. Comparing the findings of this research with responses on the arrival of new media in the past, makes similarities and differences apparent. Chapter 3 then explains the research method, a qualitative content analysis of journalist blogs integrated in Dutch national newspaper websites.

The sampling procedure, the content analysis and ethical considerations as well as the limitations and reliability of the findings will be discussed. In Chapter 4 the findings of the analysis will be presented whereupon these findings will be interpreted in Chapter 5.

The final chapter functions as a general summary of the study and touches upon the grand limitations of it. Also, the researcher will reflect upon her findings and make recommendations for future research. The report ends with the bibliography and appendices.

2Newspaper web consultant Mark Potts metaphorizes the gap between online and offline journalism as an abyss that needs to be bridged. “Potts imagined himself standing at the rim of a canyon, peering toward the other side where a magical world of online journalism — profitable online journalism — beckoned. "It sounds very Indiana Jones — standing on the cliff with this rickety wooden bridge across the chasm," he says.” (in: Layton, 2008).

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2. Theoretical framework

2.1 The changing newspaper (1869-2010)

To understand how Dutch newspapers deal with new social media nowadays, it is necessary to look at Dutch newspaper history and the way newspapers have managed earlier challenges such as verzuiling, ontzuiling, television and the internet. A brief overview of this history will be given as a preface to the subsequent chapters on the rise of the internet, user-generated content and blogs.³ The history lined out in this subchapter shows interesting repetitions and similarities with the situation nowadays.

For example, the dislike newspapers express towards online journalism appears to be nothing new (Van Dijck, 2005:418); when television became a success, newspaper journalists were also skeptical about the quality and need.

2.1.1 Circumstances had to be right

The acceleration of Dutch newspaper journalism can be traced back to 1869 when the abolishment of the Dutch stamp duty led to an explosion in growth of newspapers and newsmagazines. In the 25 years after the tax cut, the number of daily newspapers rocketed from 9 to 62. Readership increased as subscription fees could be halved. Apart from cost reduction, three major conditions smoothened the way for a successful Dutch newspaper industry at the end of the nineteenth century (Wijfjes, 2009).

First, a market for news arose. People’s incomes increased due to the Industrial Revolution and working weeks were shortened. Now people had the money and time to read the news. Literacy rates increased as ‘Het Kinderwetje van Van Houten’, a compulsory education law meant to prevent child labor, was enforced in 1874. Moreover, as the country urbanized, people felt a greater urge to know what was going on in the city they lived in.

Second, Dutch society changed, just like others, into a consumer society. The Industrial Revolution led to technological innovations that, for the first time in history, made large-scale production of cheap goods possible. Products came within reach of pretty much everyone and mass consumption kicked off. This also resulted in more newspaper advertisements and thus higher revenues. “Advertising grew from a limited strategy for transmitting local, specific information and attention to an institutionalized system of commercial information and persuasion” (Williams, 1980:170, cited in:

Chapman 2005:81).

Third, the technological conditions that could let the Dutch news industry flourish were satisfied in the nineteenth century. The invention of the paper machine cut the prices of paper production fifty percent. Also, the printing process innovated with the invention of the rotary printing press, a press with a capacity fifty times larger than its predecessor. Instead of a craft, printing became an industry. Moreover, distribution of news became easier through the train, the improvement of the mail supply system and the replacement of the sail ship by the steamboat, all reducing the time news had to travel. Furthermore, the invention of the telegraph was an important revolution, it being the first apparatus that could carry news without physical delivery. The telegraph was important for the start of international press agencies, for example Reuters. By telegram, agencies could spread the news quickly around the world. As these cable messages were

3In this study, ‘‘blogging’’ refers to news or public affairs blogging - the production of easy-to-create Web pages with regularly updated information, commentary, and links of public interest, wide and narrow (based on Lowrey andMackay (2008:64); similar definitions are used by Blood, 2003; Grabowicz, 2003; Lasica, 2003; Wall, 2004, 2005).

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13 expensive, messages had to be short, factual and objective to satisfy several countries.

There was no space for comments or opinions. The telegraph forced objectivity upon journalists (Fang, 1997:53; Forde, 2008:46).

These economical and technological conditions were met all around Europe roughly by the end of the nineteenth century. Relatively late compared to the US and UK where a serious and popular press, including Penny Press papers as the New York Sun (1833) and the New York Herald (1835), had already developed at the start of the nineteenth century. Apart from the UK, European countries trudged along behind a bit.

2.1.2 How verzuiling kept the popular press away

What set Dutch society apart from other countries was its compartmentalized character, in Dutch defined as verzuiling, lasting from roughly 1875 to 1965. The four major social groups – Protestants, Roman Catholics, socialists and liberals – had their own organizations such as schools, sport clubs and political parties. Beside that, political leaders started their own newspapers to mobilize and inform their own grassroots support. The Protestant Abraham Kuyper, for example, started De Standaard (1872) and was editor in chief from the start until his death in 1920; socialist Pieter Jelles Troelstra was founder of Het Volk (1900) and was the editor in chief for the first three years. These newspapers mainly concerned party vicissitudes and did not adopt broad journalism qualities. Being part of one of these four compartments (zuilen in Dutch) made reading

‘your’ newspaper a social duty. As a result of e.g. Protestants only reading the Protestant newspaper and socialists only their socialist counterpart, these compartments stabilized.

The compartmentalization of Dutch society was “simply catastrophically for the development of Dutch journalism” according to the late Jan Blokker (2006), a famous Dutch journalist. “From the beginning these pigeon-holed newspapers were not journalistic and not aimed at the outside world. They were political, introvert party bodies that deliberately choose to stay inward-looking. They deliberately choose to turn their back on society – let’s say on the non-members of the club.”

The compartmentalization along socio-political lines was only one of the reasons why the Netherlands did not adapt to a more popular approach to journalism as practiced by journalism barons such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Whereas the US and UK already had a flourishing popular press at the start of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands lagged behind. Apart from De Telegraaf,⁴ no Dutch newspaper employed popular concepts like selling newspapers for low prices,⁵ street vending, adaptation of easy language, little political content, human interest stories and advertisements. Also, new journalism forms such as interviews and society reporting made no headway in the Netherlands.

Why? Because the idea behind the Penny Press and Yellow Journalism concepts was that news had to sell. People had to be seduced to buy the newspaper as the more papers were sold, the more advertisers could be attracted and the more money could be made.

In the Netherlands, however, newspapers were in most cases non-impulsive purchases as the greater part was (and is) sold through subscriptions (CBS, 2009). Therefore, newspapers did not have to fight for their daily readership. Subscriptions provided a

4Interestingly, De Telegraaf is the only Dutch newspaper that has brought forth a press baron with the caliber of Pulitzer and Hearst. Hak Holdert (1870-1944) built up an impressive newspaper empire in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He took over eight newspapers and transformed them into one successful popular newspaper that included elements of the American popular press.

5In the 1820s and 1830s one cent newspapers were launched in the US and UK as a cheap alternative to the standard dailies. These papers got known as the Penny Press and were famous for their crude journalism, focusing on sensational gossip (Friedman, 2009:56), language simplicity and human interest stories (Bird, 1992:12-17).

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14 stable number of readers, especially during the compartmentalization when you had to read your paper to stay up to date with the ins and outs of your group or zuil. Moreover, Dutch journalists were rather conservative, elitist, dutiful and happy with the safe distance between journalist and audience. Interviews were seen as rude and US newspapers were said to have bad taste (Wijfjes, 2009).

2.1.3 From lap dog to watchdog

Dutch journalists kept this loyal, subservient, responsible and propagandist attitude towards their work until approximately 1965.⁶ Up to that point they behaved like the lap dog of their superiors (Brants, 2005:90) and worked according to the advocacy model, acting as the spokesperson and extension piece of their party (Schudson, 1998). In the postwar decennia, the attitude of journalists changed into a more critical, self-conscious and independent one. The traditional religious and socio-political barriers broke down (ontzuiling in Dutch) through the influence of television and other mass media. These new media made it possible for people to take note of the ideas of others. Catholics would for example look at Protestant television programs and realize that those Protestants were not really that different. Additionally, these barriers broke down as a result of secularization (Brants, 2005:90).

As people – and journalists – felt less bonded to a political party or religious group, the distance between journalism and politics increased. Journalists took up more and more the role of watchdog, checking politicians and their decisions, rather than being a party’s extension piece. A new, young generation of journalists stepped forward, blowing a wind of change through the Dutch journalism industry. In combination with increasing welfare, democratization and polarization, the time of lap dog journalism was officially over. The Dutch journalist had transformed itself into ‘a watchdog’ (Blokker, cited in:

idem 362).

2.1.4 Television as a competitor

When television came within reach of the mass and (news) broadcasts became more abundant, newspaper readership decreased. No longer were only papers bidding for the audience’s favor; from the sixties onwards, newspapers also had to compete with television “that after a slow start got hold of an undisputed center position within Dutch society” (Bardoel et al., 2005:265). First, news broadcasts looked like spoken newspapers, but over the years television started to develop its own powerful visual discourse (Van Dijck, 2005:418).

“An important indication of the television’s success was the opposite imitation. Newspapers took a surreptitious look at the viewing figures of news broadcasts and started to imitate the young conventions of television news in their newspapers. The best known example is the American newspaper USA Today that was founded in the early eighties. From the outside it looked like a printed television. The widespread convention to print a large color picture (mostly only provided with a caption) on the front page is only one example of the many influences television news had on the newspaper.”

(Van Dijck, 2005:418)

In the Netherlands, newspaper and television journalism did for a long time not get along well. “The Dutch elite – including the quality newspapers – observed the success of the television with a profound distrust” (Bardoel et al., 2005:265). The deeply feared

6War time was an exception. Resistance journalists from all kinds of backgrounds worked together during the Second World War to secure neutral news coverage as opposed to the German propaganda. The abolition of press compartmentalization seemed close, but even before the liberation zuil elites already took control of the old and new newspapers (Blokker, 2006; Oosterbaan and Wansink, 2008:139). The compartmentalization of the Dutch society continued.

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15 mass culture that already made its entry in America and the United Kingdom had now made its headway in the Netherlands. This visual culture would oust the power of the word and books and newspapers would disappear, the elite feared. Society would trivialize. Newspapers decided to keep a close eye on the quality of television programs and let newspaper editors write columns about the content broadcasted on this new medium (idem).

In the meanwhile, the Dutch government slowly deregulated and liberalized the news industry, making up-scaling possible. Where the newspaper used to be a relatively small- scale mass medium, dominating the debate within the compartmentalized society, “it now developed into a large-scale, commercially exploited communication product that had to bid for the public’s favor every day” (Lichtenberg, 2005:427-428). As a result of the up-scaling possibilities, the number of newspaper organizations decreased to eleven during the last decade, with three leading figures holding the stage. That is, first, the Telegraaf Media Group, publishing several popular newspapers and human interest magazines; second, De Persgroep Nederland, producing predominantly the more serious newspapers, magazines and multimedia; and third, Wegener, who focuses more on regional dailies and free local papers. The reduction to three main publishers was a result of “economical Darwinism” (Chorus, 1994:62); the newspapers that attracted the most readers and advertisement revenues continued to exist, the weaker ones had to quit.

2.1.5 From watchdog to Cerberus

Though the number of newspaper organizations decreased, by the end of the twentieth century, people had a whole range of news suppliers to choose from. Information was supplied via the good old newspaper as well as via radio, television and – later – the internet (see: 2.2). As socio-cultural and religious boundaries had largely disappeared and Dutch society individualized, the Dutch audience emancipated (Dijkstra et al., 2007:123; Van Gent and Katus, 1995:91). No longer could the traditional paternalistic perpendicularly organized journalism run the show; it was the news consumer that set the tone as it expressed with its zapping behavior (Lichtenberg, 2005:362). “Audiences become simultaneously easier than ever to reach and harder than ever to hold”, as Singer (1997:76) formulated it aptly.

According to Schudson (1998), at the end of the twentieth century the trustee model changed into the market model. Journalists could no longer determine what they felt the audience needed to know (trustee model); they now had to conform to the wishes of the audience and the market to stay profitable (market model). It was a difficult situation for journalists who had just taken up the role of watchdog. Dutch quality newspapers feared that commercialization would endanger the multiformity of the press, leading to journalistic decay and eventually to the end of newspaper journalism.

Not surprisingly, newspapers and publishers responded in different ways to this new reality. In terms of Brants’ dog metaphors (2005:97), the journalist changed from watchdog into a Cerberus, the many-headed dog from Greek mythology, symbolizing the many faces Dutch journalism had now adopted. The watchdog was still present (Dutch examples are Vrij Nederland (WEEKLY), KRO Reporter (TV) and Zembla (TV)), but got company from the poodle that focuses more on appearance (nrc.next (DAILY), De Wereld Draait Door (TV)), the Labrador that runs after others (Sp!ts, Metro (DAILIES)), the hound that hunts for skeletons in the closet (hardly found in the Netherlands, De Telegraaf (DAILY) and Quote (MONTHLY) sometimes come close) and the pit-bull that suddenly attacks and is always hungry for excitement (De Telegraaf (DAILY), Nieuwe Revu (WEEKLY)).

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16 2.1.6 Why this historic overview matters

The history as described above shows interesting similarities with the current media situation. First, history shows repetition. Just like the newspapers disliked the arrival and success of television journalism, questioning if this new medium could deliver quality news, nowadays there are journalists who openly dislike news websites and online journalism, again questioning if the web can serve as a technology to deliver quality journalism. History thus repeats itself: with every arrival of a new medium, the newspaper feels threatened and defeats itself.

Second, the listed history shows that developments can accelerate. At first, the news consumer could only consume what was being laid out for him by the newspaper. With the arrival of television, things changed. The news consumer could now express his appreciation or dislike of a program by staying on the channel or zapping to another.

When the internet became a success, this development accelerated. The news consumer was no longer restricted to a handful of television channels. He could now visit numerous internet websites and stay as long as he pleased, from seconds up to hours.

The remote control, one could say, has been a herald for a more extensive ‘zapping’

behavior amongst consumers.

The individualization of Dutch society also accelerated. The demolition of the traditional religious and socio-political barriers halfway through the sixties can be seen as an omen in this respect. From that point onwards people felt less bonded to a political party or religious group. They started to make their own choices and select media they liked. Offering those free choices is exactly what the internet does, but on an enormously large scale. With innumerable websites it is up to the user to decide what to do online at what time. Thus, the removal of religious and socio-political standards within society cleared the way for our current internet society.

The major reason for adding this historical framework should then be clear: one needs to know the past to understand the present. To be able to interpret the current situation, which is central in this study, one has to look at the way media responded to similar situations in the past. Thus, if one studies journalist blogs on newspaper websites, the entire history of newspapers can be relevant.

2.2 The internet and the rise of social media

After the success of television in the twentieth century, newspapers saw another competitor entering the news market: the internet experienced its great breakthrough. At the start of the twenty-first century, this worldwide network of interconnected computer networks came within reach of everyone; the news and communication monopoly of traditional media was pulled down. The internet forced change upon the routines of journalists, but also opened the door for social media. The way Dutch newspapers approached these new challenges will be discussed in this subchapter. Blogs, as will become clear, were one of the challenges newspapers faced.

2.2.1 From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

At first, websites were rather static pages and mainly consisted of one-way communication. Web pages copied purposes, genres and forms from the traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television. An enormous collection of individual websites arose. This Web 1.0 was dealing with the so-called horseless carriage syndrome (McLuhan, 1964). That is to say, “a new medium is considered in terms of the old medium, just as the car was seen as a carriage, but without a horse” (Schuurman, in:

Marcus et al., 2010:15o). In the case of the internet, this meant that the internet first had to change into a mass technology, before it could grow to its full, unique potential.

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17 The internet indeed became a mass technology, but before it could grow to the interactive platform it is nowadays, it first had to leave the dot-com bubble behind. From roughly 1997 to 2001 the internet was praised to the skies. The number of internet connections grew tremendously and so did the number of internet-based companies – also known as “dot-coms”. Their stock prices rapidly increased to unrealistic levels, eventually leading to an economic bubble that burst in March 2001.

After the dot-com bubble the medium matured (Huang, 2009:107) into Web 2.0, a platform for interactive web applications that differed from Web 1.0 in its focus on interaction and networking. No longer is it only the website owner who decides what is being published; every internet user could now contribute to the web. Social network website Facebook, video sharing website YouTube and the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia are successful examples of Web 2.0 enterprises. Dutch examples are social network website Hyves and shock blog GeenStijl.

Not only did Web 2.0 change the rather passive internet consumer in a more active participant (Saffo, 2006), it also changed the way news is made as the boundaries between print, broadcast and online media are disappearing. Web 2.0 led to media convergence. Moreover, as internet makes it possible for virtually anyone to publish e.g.

news, photos and videos online, “the borderline that separates professional journalists and their audience seems to be blurring” (Domingo et al. 2008:327). That makes one wonder when an online published article is a journalistic article and when it cannot be credited as such. Citizen journalism, a new branch of journalism, can therefore be called

“a slippery creature” (Lasica, 2003b), as it confuses traditional definitions of journalism.

That numerous overlapping or connected terms have recently been brought into use (e.g. participatory journalism, public journalism, street journalism, guerrilla journalism, user generated content, social media, new media), did not help the clarity of the discussion either. Before zooming in on the rise of citizen journalism in general (see:

2.2.2) and blogs especially (see: 2.2.3), a distinction between the connected terms USER-

GENERATED CONTENT – SOCIAL MEDIA – CITIZEN JOURNALISM will be made.

In short, websites like video-sharer YouTube, collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia and photo and video hosting website Flickr offer people (professional journalists as well as non-journalists) the possibility to publish their own media online.

These self produced media are called USER-GENERATED CONTENT (UGC) and can be embedded in (journalistic and non-journalistic) web sites and shared via SOCIAL MEDIA

such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. These are online platforms that allow users to create and share their personally selected content with friends, without the intervention of an editor.

In fact, it is nothing new that people generate content or create media and share it with others. Old media made use of reader and viewer contributions for years. People would submit home videos to television programs or write letters to newspaper editors.

What sets ‘new UGC’ apart from ‘old UGC’ is that generating media and sharing and submitting it is a whole lot easier due to consumer friendly websites, platforms and software and the worldwide internet network.

With these definitions in the back of our minds, it should be a little easier to explain the blurred difference between professional journalism and CITIZEN JOURNALISM. Both professional and citizen journalists can create user-generated content and use social media to share it with the world. However, whereas traditional media are complete news institutions, citizen journalism can take different shapes: it can vary from audience participation at mainstream news outlets (e.g. by submitting photos, reader contributions and forum participation) to full-fledged participatory news sites (e.g.

NowPublic, OhmyNews) (Lasica, 2003b). Thus citizen journalism can be part of

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18 professional journalism; it is not necessarily an independent news medium, like the latter is.

2.2.2 How citizen journalism found its gap

To interpret the raise of citizen journalism, the developments at the end of the twentieth century are crucial. At that time, circulation figures of newspapers started to decrease worldwide because of disconnect with citizens. Western societies had become more individualized and emancipated than ever before. Trust in traditional institutions had decreased amongst the audience (Luhmann, 2000 (1996):1) because of the institutional focus and the gap between the media and citizens. Mass media presumed a mass audience, but that mass had – due to individualization and emancipation – changed into extremely fragmented groups. There was not just one audience anymore, if there had ever been one. A great number of groups felt they were not represented by the media of that time and cancelled their newspaper subscription.

At this time of disconnect between media and citizens, the internet came and websites started to offer easily accessible communication and interaction tools and technologies (e.g. consumer friendly weblogs, instant messaging programs, social networks) without the intervention of traditional media. The web became a platform for a great variety of audiences. Numerous websites on numerous topics were set up, making it possible to serve the smallest niches. Forums became popular platforms to discuss everything from the news to specific hobbies. Opinion pages in newspapers, for example, were no longer the only platform for public debate; from now on the public debate could be held anywhere and anytime and anyone with an internet connection could participate.

Through these new web technologies (online) citizen journalism could accelerate. This rather new type of journalism gave citizens an active role in the process of making news, instead of the traditionally passive role they always had had. Citizen reporters no longer wanted to wait to consume the end products of traditional media, but started to collect and make the news themselves. Some went out on the streets to report news events and published articles, videos and blogs on their website. “The idea behind citizen journalism”, as the American new media journalist Glaser (2006) summarizes tellingly,

“is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the [i]nternet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others”.

At first, traditional media did not take these online citizen reporters and contributors all that seriously. They did not expect untrained citizens who were not familiar with the journalism industry to be able to compete with their experienced reporters. But, slowly the public efforts did start to become successful. Citizen blogs and websites attracted an increasing audience and some became well-known, such as the global Indymedia network, set up in 1999 by a group of leftwing activists who felt that traditional journalism did not pay enough attention to the risks of globalization and other political and social issues. In three years time, 89 Indymedia websites were set up by citizen journalists in 31 countries to report the news they deemed relevant. Their journalists reported the news differently from traditional media and often had a large database of citizen reporters who could supply original footage or information. The open publication approach also differed from the traditional approach. Everyone could publish on their websites, adjustments were only made afterwards.

That citizen journalism was no longer a marginal player in the media field, became apparent during the 2004 US presidential election. Both Democrats and Republicans gave press credentials to citizen reporters. Now that even politicians took these citizen initiatives seriously, it was clear that traditional media could no longer work their way around them.

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19 2.2.3 Blogs enter the journalistic ecosystem

The history of blogs is pretty similar to the history of citizen journalism.⁷ Traditional media first ignored blogs, just like they trivialized citizen initiatives, but when blogs brought news before professional journalist did, journalists simply could not ignore their presence any longer.

Especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of blogs increased dramatically. Blog search machine Technorati counted half a million blogs in 2003. A year later, in 2004, the number had increased to four million, and in 2008 – the last year Technorati counted them – the number had skyrocketed up to 133 million blogs. Fifty percent of the blogs are from Americans, twenty-seven percent from Europeans (Technorati, 2008).

In America, this growth of blogging was driven by “animus against the press”, Rosenberg concludes (2009:269) in his well-known biography of blogging. He writes that, by the end of the twentieth century, left- as well as rightwing bloggers started fact- checking traditional journalism to point out the mistakes journalists made and the prejudices they had. “It was as though the pent-up pressure of a century’s worth of unpublished letters to the editor had suddenly exploded online in a fury of indignation and complaint”, Rosenberg writes. Traditional media looked at it with amusement. They wrote about blogs, but did not see their authors as competition for the newspaper.

“There was no reason for the pros to be alarmed – because, really, how many people actually read blogs? Or would ever?”

An understandable misconception, Rosenberg says, but still a misconception. The battle between journalists and bloggers arose slowly as the 24-hour news cycle in the blogosphere started to get on journalists’ nerves. Journalists were used to being able to set the agenda of public dialogue by publishing a daily newspaper or broadcasting news at set times, but these bloggers just kept on publishing. In fact, the way bloggers worked was the herald of the way journalists would also have to work in the near future, but the latter did not (want to) realize that yet. By focusing on the differences between journalists and bloggers, members of both groups “came to treat each other as bitter enemies” (idem) whereas in fact, the discussions about blogging brought to light the vague definition of “journalist” (idem; Regan, 2003).

The battle between journalists and bloggers fizzled out halfway through the 2000’s when blogs had proven to be of great value during big events and disasters such as the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (2004), the London bombings (2005) and the American elections (2004, 2008). After the catastrophic tsunami, for example, traditional journalists even complimented the blogosphere. “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs”, John Schwartz of the New York Times acknowledged just days after the disaster (2005, December 28).

Similarly, citizen journalism as a whole was taken more seriously by traditional journalism.

“Bloggers vs. journalists is over”, Rosen stated in 2005. “The time-worn debate of bloggers vs. journalists has finally run its course”, Mark Glaser, new media journalist and specialist, agrees with him in 2008.

“While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention:

Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.”

(Glaser, 2008)

7Blogs can be seen as a form of citizen journalism, but as blogs play a major role in this study, their rising will also be discussed separately.

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20 The fear that blogs would wipe away traditional journalism has proven groundless, Rosenberg adds. “The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism.

The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the [i]nternet is turning it into a symbiotic ecosystem — in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.”

In other words, the blogosphere challenged traditional journalism to become serious online players. Not only because of the challenge, but also because blogs needed traditional media to be online to be able to refer to them and interact with them: to make each other stronger and better.

That blogs and more generally citizen journalism pulled traditional media online, had another effect: it forced a greater use of user-generated content upon traditional media, online as well as offline. Though most newspapers had some sort of content created by their readers, such as letters to editors and photos submitted by readers, the online approach requested more of these interaction tools.

2.3 The kick-off of the Dutch online era

2.3.1 Dutch newspapers online

The start of the online era in the Netherlands was slightly different. Here, too, traditional media saw their audiences shrinking at the end of the twentieth century due to the individualization of society and the rise of the internet. Just like after the introduction of the television, newspapers feared for their future. Some expected that free web editions of the newspaper would be the end of the paid paper version as readers would cancel their subscriptions (Oosterbaan and Wansink, 2008:63).

After some hesitation, all Dutch newspapers set up a website in the nineties; in 1994 local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad was the first to go online (idem). The doubts about the internet were clearly visible on the websites. The first websites were mainly extension pieces of the newspaper, just like the first news broadcasts were oral copies of the newspaper.

Newspapers did not only have to compete with broadcast and radio stations, but also with new news websites specialized in online content. Nu.nl, for example, already attracted the fourth-most visitors of all news websites in 2001 (Bardoel et al., 2005:358).

They could fill up the gap that ‘old media’ left open, due to their hesitant step towards the web. Dutch newspapers were too slow to “re-engage with their audience as fellow citizens rather than potential customers”, Deuze (2005) says. In his eyes, the media has – after the success of the internet – not taken up new roles “as bottom-up facilitators and moderators of community-level conversations among citizens”.

Moreover, newspapers had to fight harder for their news. Political parties and other institutions, that previous to the arrival of the internet needed the newspaper to get their message across, started their own websites to communicate directly with the public.

2.3.2 Citizen journalism

Where in the US citizen journalism took off successfully at the end of the nineties, the call for this new type of journalism did not get answered in the Netherlands until the start of the zeroes. The crisis of confidence between the newspapers and the public was not as heavy as the one that had arisen in America (Bardoel et al., 2005:384). As a result, citizen journalism never got really big in the Netherlands. Indymedia, a worldwide participatory network of generally leftwing, activist citizen journalists who write about political and social issues, started a Dutch website and some hyperlocal websites were set

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21 up, but these initiatives are next to nothing compared with the great number of American initiatives.

Apart from a lack of full-fledged citizen news websites, traditional media did slowly start to embed more user-generated content options. Nowadays, readers can comment on articles, share articles via their social networks, publish their own blogs on a special webpage of some of the newspapers, submit photos and videos to news websites, et cetera. Dutch newspapers do not only initiate participation opportunities for the audience, they also start taking initiatives themselves by adopting new forms of social media such as blogs and Twitter.

2.3.3 The Dutch blogosphere

Again, different from the situation in the US, Dutch journalists and bloggers did not really get into a heated argument about journalism at the start of the twenty-first century. Not many bloggers, who can measure up to the national fame and topic choices of Americans like Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit.com), Markos Moulitsas (Dailykos) and Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), have stood up. Chavannes (2007b) and Oosterbaan and Wansink (2008:78) relate the lack of a Dutch blogosphere to the smaller Dutch- speaking regions, making it harder to find advertisers and to make a living out of it.

According to Verwey (2007), a Dutch journalism lecturer, this is a due to the disapproving attitude of traditional media and the blogs themselves who did not always contribute to a serious blogosphere.

Shock blog GeenStijl.nl (Dutch for ‘a lack of style or manners’) is the exception to this unwritten rule and is the big success story of the Dutch blogosphere. With 1.6 million visitors each month – 70 percent is male – it makes it to the top 10 Dutch news sites.

Moreover, the blog successfully campaigned to become a public broadcasting organization. They broadcast on Dutch public television since 2010.

Since its foundation in 2003, GeenStijl.nl often made the news with its hoaxes and provocative actions. In 2005, the blog called up its very loyal readers to become a member of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), a political party, so they could go en masse to the party meeting to vote against government participation. Even more memorable was the resignation of Ella Vogelaar, Minister of Housing and Immigration, after she refused to answer critical questions from a GeenStijl.nl reporter. The reporter kept on following her, the camera man kept on filming. Not long after the pursuit was published online, her party leadership removed her from her position.

GeenStijl.nl is famous for its sarcasm, directness, openness, fierceness and deliberately renounces political correctness, journalistic principles and nuance. Founder Dominique Weesie says he wants to introduce the merciless British tabloid style to the Netherlands by polishing off enemies, telling the whole story (e.g. publishing the entire last name of a suspect while traditional journalists in the Netherlands do not) and campaigning (cited in De Nieuwe Reporter, 2006). Gutter journalism is indeed a virgin territory within the Dutch journalism industry and a hole in the market as can be deduced from their positive visitor figures.

Other successful Dutch blogs are mainly aimed at niche markets such as Autoblog.nl and Biertijd.com and marketing and internet blogs such as DutchCowboys.nl, Frank- watching.com and Marketingfacts.nl.⁸

Dutch traditional media were skeptical in the beginning – just like their American colleagues (Lowrey and Mackay, 2008) – but eventually they started incorporating blogs into their websites. It seems plausible that Dutch journalists have crossed the bridge

8Weblog Hyped.nl calculated in 2009 how much Dutch blogs are worth and made a top 30. GeenStijl.nl was number one with 14 million euro. Autoblog.nl followed with 3.1 million euro and Biertijd.com made it to number three with 2.9 million euro.

The hesitant adoption of blogs

M ASTER T HESIS

Journalism goes social: