Negotiating Claims to Journalism: Webloggers' Orientation to News Genres

Abstract

This paper explores how writers of online diaries, or weblogs, about public affairs negotiate their relationship with the genres and social position of news journalism. Although often labelled radical journalists, this paper finds, through interviews with seven webloggers, that such writers orient themselves in complex ways towards news journalism, at times drawing upon its modes of knowledge, at times setting themselves in opposition to it and at times seeking to cross discursive spaces. The paper concludes that, rather than emerging as a new public communicative form or genre in relation to journalism, the distinctiveness of the form is in its generic heterogeneity and ability to traverse the boundaries of news and other institutional discourses.