Professional Bloggers

I explored political activism through the use of blogs. I broke blogging into two groups, professional and amateur blogging. The difference is that professionals are current or former journalist and the blog is not just a hobby, but functions and a digital newspaper searching for new information with the aim to break a story. On the other hand amateur political bloggers are people with an interest in politics as a personal hobby, but are not aiming to create news just discuss it.

Although, both types are important I focused on the professional blogs such as talking points memo and Huffington post. I tend to group politico in this group because they are mainly on the web, but do publish a small newspaper in D.C.

I spent each day of my project searching these blogs. There is a strong influence of the print tradition on these blogs because most of them are Journalists. What is interesting about these media is that they allow for a lot of user comments and talking points memo allows people to participate in certain sections of the website. Usually these sites are starting by younger people looking to make a splash in political reporting with out all of the restraints that print media has