Bamblog

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Weblogs are becoming an important tool for political action - in different respects. Think about Weblogs by individual politicians and political parties, especially think about the "Dean for America Campaign" which relied heavily on Weblogs as tool for communication and coordination.
But Blogs can do more: They provide information, articulate opinions, and facilitate discussion and deliberation, thus contributing to the public sphere in general. From a communication science point of view, the relation between the Blogosphere and "traditional" mass media deserves particular attention, and of course some answers are already given, based on general observations as well as on empirical studies.
An interesting case of the latter is the study "Big Media" meets the "Bloggers": Coverage of Trent Lott’s Remarks at Strom Thurmond’s Birthday Party by Esther Scott of the Kennedy School of Government. It describes in detail one of the most important incidents in Blog History when "the blogsphere had, perhaps for the first time, affected the reporting of a news story and, in the process, achieved a toehold in the world of ‘big media’" (p.22).
At the 100th-birthday-party for Republican senator Strom Thurmond (5th Dec. 2002), the then House Majority Leader Trent Lott showed support for racist positions Thurmond held in the 1940ies (but gave up over the following decades). The party was covered by mass media (print and TV), but with the exception of ABC News none of their stories mentioned the racist remarks; even at ABC the story wasn’t followed the next days, because there seemed to be no "news pegs" or "news factors" attached to it (and other news were selected to be more prominent).
However, a couple of widely read blogs from both the left and right side of the political spectrum (Atrios, Talkingpointsmemo, Instapundit, The daily dish) picked up the story from the ABC Web Site and, over the following days, criticized both the remarks by Lott and the indifference of mass media to them. After a couple of days, similar remarks from Lott’s past surfaced in the blogosphere and in national newspapers. The Senator was forced to deliver a series of apologies, each one more humble than the previous, but in the end he had to resign from his post as majority leader in the Senate.

The case study gives a number of explanations for the Weblogs’ success to bring this story to the public despite their limited audience:

1) Bloggers might be more open and attentive to information the "journalism establishement" doesn’t find newsworthy. Some reporters covering the birthday party focused on the "show aspects" of the event, and Lott’s remarks were seen as unfitting and tasteless, but not that spectacular.
2) Weblogs can "percolate" a story over a longer time span, because they are not bound to the news cycle of 24 hours, after which "hot news" become "old news". Over a couple of days, the story built up in the Blogosphere, with a lot of Bloggers commenting on the story and linking to the major blogs in their own "micropublications".
3) The story didnt’ follow the usual partisan "discussion rituals" between Left and Right, but was covered by liberal as well as conservative bloggers.

The case study highlights various differences between the media forms, but also points out that there is no reason to believe Weblogs will replace traditional Mass Media (a scenario that seems to show up whenever a new kind of medium appears on the scene). This is basically due to two factors: Weblogs lack a) the ability to accumulate attention on the same scale as national newspapers or TV Stations and b) lack the resources (mostly organizational, some individual) for extended research that is necessary to develop a story. As two quotes from the case study put it: Weblogs might be "a modest but helpful complement to mainstream journalism", useful in "putting a deft touch on pre-existing information rather than in generating completely new findings" (p.25) And, quoting Blogger Atrios: "Weblogs still need the validation of print and television media - otherwise it’s just a bunch of people ranting away on the Internet, which is nothing new." (p.26).

But if we assume that Weblogs as a political voice (rather than a privat, journal-type kind of publication) continue to grow, the distinction between Weblogs and Mass Media might become increasingly blurred. As Clay Shirky observes, the inherent tendency of networks like the blogosphere to produce a small number of heavily linked/connected nodes will lead to instances of "blogs-as-mainstream-media": Weblogs which will draw a lot of attention but might lack the direct feedback the smaller, more personal Blogs can provide.
Rather than contrasting Weblogs and Mass Media, we should look at the connections between both and the way they form a "news network": Some (but surely not all) news and stories will emerge form the interplay and feedback loops of Mass Media and Weblogs, where the one picks up leads from the other. Weblogs can provide a specific kind of agenda setting: Picking up topics that have been mentioned but not covered in detail by other media. These topic can accumulate publicity and attention when more and more sites link to original sources (often called the "echochamber effect" of the Blogosphere).

I know there is some interesting works on the dynamics of "news spread" in weblog networks (comparing the dissemination of ideas and memes to the spread of infections and diseases), but have to look them up another day. Just one more idea: The network mechanisms seem to work on different levels. With regard to point 1) from above we could argue that Mainstream journalists and politicians (in Washington, but probably in other capitals like Berlin as well) have a relatively dense cluster of connections, and are dependent on another (politicians need publicity, journalists need access to sources and information). Bloggers, on the other hand, are not part of these networks but outsiders. As such, they are free to elaborate on certain topics established "insider journalists" might not always follow.

Update 06/22: I was thinking about the studies conducted at the HP Information Dynamics Lab (IDL), mentioned in this article from WIRED (and in a lot of blogs, obviously). The researchers at IDL did a study of what they call information epidemics - they tracked the flow of specific information through the network of Blogs. In a paper titled "Implicit structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace", Adar et.al. model the paths of information and propose a new ranking algorithm ("iRank") to measure the impact of Blogs that generate new information but might not be linked to by others. They opened their Blog Epidemic Analyzer to the online public, so you can research your own "infection paths" for certain keywords or phrases (but only for May 2003..).
However, to look at "news networks" I described above, we would have to complement the analysis of information flow in the Blogosphere with some analysis of "transfer areas", that is the group of nodes that connect the Weblog and the Mass Media part of the whole network.