“The blog cage was a horror”: Socio-technical boundary work in the institutionalization of blogging in online journalism

Abstract

The paper examines how the integration of blogs as a new media into online journalism took place in Hungary in the mid-2000s through a case study of the cooperation between Blog. hu, the largest blog platform in the country at the time, and Index. hu, the leading online news site. Building on the intersections between the Social construction of technology (SCOT) and Boundary work theory (BWT), the concept of Socio-technical boundary work (STBW) provides the theoretical framework in the study, which aims to explore how the blog as a new medium was created, discussed and incorporated into journalism by media professionals. The paper investigates how discussions of technological and professional standards, such as online journalistic values and media business expectations, intertwined to shape the relationship between bloggers and journalists and between blogs and journalism. It also examines how these values were represented by the two main relavant social groups involved in debates and conflicts around blogs: the integrators and the separatists. Finally, it explores how the initially contested new media eventually became an established, normalized platform for online journalism.