Journalism and the Blogosphere: Genre and Thematic Intersections

Section: Modern Journalism: Subjects and Issues

The article presents the results of research on how blogs relate to journalism in genre and thematic terms. Content analysis of the most popular Russian-language blogs on five social networks (VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter) shows that bloggers practically do not use journalistic genres and the topics of the vast majority of publications do not pass the selection criteria adopted by the media. Blogs are mainly used for self-presentation, audience entertainment, and stories about personal experiences. Socially significant topics are extremely rare in publications, usually they take the form of reprints of news from the media and short comments. All this leads to the conclusion that the blogosphere is much closer to show business than to journalism. Popular bloggers compete with the media for audience attention and advertisers‘ money, but not for coverage of what is happening in the world.

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