Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks

According to several 2008 reports, blogging continues to attract writers and readers (Comscore Media Matrix, 2008; eMarketer, 2008; Sifry, 2008; Universal McCann, 2008). This form of Web content creation has matured beyond public personal journaling to support citizen journalism or journalism produced by independent bloggers unaffiliated with professional newsrooms (Lenhart Levine, Locke, Searls, Rosen, 2006; Scoble Suroweicki, 2005; Weinberger, 2003, 2008). This inversion of elite control is the social outcome of a more interactive format. Blogs are popularly viewed as a form of social media, or media that is architected by design to readily support participation, peer-to-peer conversation, collaboration, and community (O’Reilly, 2004). Social media tools such as blogs enable Web content creators to circumvent the high transaction costs that once characterized usage of earlier media technologies (Gillmor, 2004; Benkler, 2006; Bowman Shirky, 2008). Independent political bloggers that comment on day-to-day news command a readership rivaling that of traditional media entities (Armstrong Strupp, 2008). The growth in the independent political blogger’s credibility has taken place against the backdrop of traditional media’s loss