Yesterday on a mailing list I’m a member of, someone pointed to Kaye D. Sweetser’s article, Blog bias: Reports, inferences, and judgments of credentialed bloggers at the 2004 nominating conventions. Since I was one of those credentialed bloggers, I was particularly interested what the article had to say. I contacted Kaye and got the longer version of her article.

In her research, she had people code each sentence in the blogs written as part of the convention coverage into three basic types; reports, inferences and judgments. Each of these were further broken down into whether the reports were attributed or not, whether the inferences were labeled or not, and whether the judgments were favorable or unfavorable, and whether they were attributed or not. She did further analysis on the role of gender in the coverage as well as the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans.

The results were about as I would have expected. Traditional media has a higher percentage of ‘reports’, approximately twice the percentage that bloggers use. Given that many traditional journalists are called ‘reporters’ and that ‘traditional media coverage holds objective reporting sacrosanct’, this isn’t surprising. Yet even for the bloggers at the conventions, the most common form of sentence was the report.

I went to the convention with no pretense of being a reporter. I wore my bias on my sleeve and in the form of buttons and stickers on my shirt. Since that experience, I have blogged many events. I have not shied away from expressing my biases and try to be as up front as I can be about what underlies these biases.

In light of this, I wonder how I compared with the other bloggers who were credentialed in 2004. Did I use more reporting or judgments than other bloggers at the time? How has my writing changed over the years? How has the writing of other bloggers changed? What will the blogging at the 2008 conventions be like? Beyond the political realm, how does this apply to other bloggers?

The academic would say that this report, and these questions illustrate the need for further research. I agree. It also provides material for those hoping to blog the 2008 conventions should think about as they prepare to cover them.