Blogs as a possibility to express yourself for journalists Текст научной статьи по специальности «СМИ (медиа) и массовые коммуникации»

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Published in the Slovak Republic

Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie)

Has been issued since 2005

ISSN 1994-4160

E-ISSN 1994-4195

2018, 58(4): 119-129

DOI: 10.13187/me.2018.4.119 www.ejournal53.com

Blogs as a Possibility to Express Yourself for Journalists I.M. Mudra a , *

a Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine

Abstract

Modern society embodies its information needs through the freedom of bloggers. As a result, there are many independent individual or collective blogs around the world. A lot of journalists are bloggers because it gives them the opportunity to express their subjective opinion. Blog's a collector of information, writer, and editor, the material is published in its original form, without editorial changes, and with the ability to express what is on the mind. It also enables the author to keep track of the reaction of readers, respond to their comments and be open to new information. Blogs not only play a role in changing the way how traditional journalists do their work, but they are also becoming more and more a part of the business of traditional media. Blogs that are led by journalists differ from other blogs with their professionalism, objectivity and qualified approach to expose topics. In this article, we present our classification of journalistic blogs, which was based on the research of blogs which were led by journalists. We also present the results of the survey about journalistic blogs, in particular what types of journalistic blogs are most often read and which topics are popular among the blogger's audience.

Keywords: blog, journalist, mass media, weblog, blogger, Internet, information, media text.

1. Introduction

Internet mass media often devote a section for blogs. The authors are not only journalists, experts, publicists or politicians, but ordinary readers as well. Every year, blogs are becoming more popular. Especially in countries where there is a problem with freedom of speech and intimacy of mass media. After all, bloggers, especially journalists due to their blogs have the opportunity to speak freely without censorship. Reporters without Borders claim on their website that Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. K. Hearn (Hearn, 2009: 887) argues that in the People's Republic of China (PRC) the emergence of blogs and the development of the Internet, in general, have been used to reinforce the central authority of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Journalisttic blogs are also increasing the popularity of the author and the media on which posted. Therefore, there is a need for detailed research and study of this genre and the classification of existing journalistic blogs. There are only a few scientific publications on journalistic blogs because blogosphere researchers often do not separate blogs lead by journalists from others. However, we believe that journalistic blogs deserve an independent analysis for research as they differ from other blogs by following journalism standards and they have their specific. These peculiarities' lay in that blogs are part of content online media and journalists

* Corresponding author

E-mail addresses: ariane@ukr.net (I. M. Mudra)

should write their own blogs to expand the audience of their media and use each tool of the blogosphere. So they have the chance to expand the field of audience and improve their journalistic skills and abilities. That is why we investigate journalistic blogs.

2. Materials and methods

The main sources for writing this article became the materials of the journalist blogs. In the study there were used the basic methods of cognition: historical and situational, systemic and the comparative method. The use of historical method allows to reproduce the development of the creation and the establishment of blogs. Comparative method defines the difference in the classification of blogs by different researchers. During the researching it was used the method of analysis of blogs of Ukrainian, Russian, American journalists (from the whole amount of 150 blogs 26 - blogs of Russian journalists, 15 - American, the rest - Ukrainian). We analyzed Ukrainian blogs on the blog platforms (Livejournal and Blogger) and in rubric "blogs" in online media Korrespondent, Ukrayinska Pravda, Novynar, Gazeta.ua, 24tv.ua, TSN, Tyzhden.ua and blogs as author sites. We paid attention on the content of the blogs, time of renewing and specific of presenting the information.

To find out the preferences of blogs we decided to provide an online survey. We provided survey in social network Facebook and also sent private messages to readers of blogs. In the survey could take part people of different age, status, education. For us it was important to get answers from the readers of blogs about the theme of materials which they are interested in, which kinds of blogs they prefer to, on what platforms they read blogs etc. We didn't divide audience by personal data. We have got answers from 1000 respondents of different age (23-50 y.o.). The answers were got as form the pages in Facebook (73 %) and as answer of private message 27 %. The survey was hold during February - March 2018.

3. Discussion

G. Thompson (Thompson, 2003) says, that there is no single definition of blogs. It is truth. Researchers can't agree with the definition "blog/web blog". K. Hearn (Hearn, 2009: 887) believes, that blogs or weblogs are online journals that are regularly updated, and which cover thousands of topics. S.-Y. Kim et al. (Kim et al., 2006: 411) say, that blog is a personal journal which is maintained on the web. Blogs are internet platform that don't require advanced web information and allows sharing all sorts of text images and videos. A. Akcay (Akcay, 2012: 1654) believes that it allows writers to comment articles. The other researchers call "blog" as a website which contains a series of frequently updated, chronologically ordered posts on a common web page, usually written by a single author (Herring et al., 2004, in Hookway, 2008; Serfarty, 2004, Bar-Ilan, 2005). S. Herring (Herring et al., 2004, in Hookway, 2008) gives the following definition - online diaries or what I call 'self-narratives', where private content is posted in daily, monthly and yearly snippets. We consider that the best definition is suggested by the researchers of the blogosphere O.V. Chekmyshev and L.A. Yaroshenko (Chekmyshev, Yaroshenko, 2014: 26). They give the following blog definitions: a personal diary available for all the users on your own or a partner website. It has specific informative or an analytical genre that allows to distribute to Internet and social networks information regularly, analytical or personally emotional comments; including personal website, the main content of which - personal notes, which author, added regularly in the reverse chronological order (last record from the top), as well as commentary users and images or multimedia. The M. Garden (Garden, 2012: 483) asserts, that the real problem is not that the term blog is difficult to define (it is) but that most scholars are using it in vague, contradictory, ambiguous and imprecise ways.

K. Hearn (Hearn, 2009: 887) believes blogs or weblogs are online journals that are regularly updated, and cover thousands of topics. In a way, blogs represent the free speech philosophy of the early days of the Internet. They allow users to distribute opinion on an enormous variety of topics, and in some countries relatively uncensored view, though potentially they can be monitored everywhere (Hearn, 2009: 887).

Researchers E.A. Kozhemyakin and A.A. Popov (Kozhemyakin, Popov, 2012: 150), and we entirely agree with them, note that the blog, even written by a professional journalist is not a journalism, though it contains elements of professional journalism. A blog is a tool of journalistic communication, the application of which for purely professional purposes allows journalism to be

more socially responsible, more interactive and responsive to the audience's requests (Kozhemyakin, Popov, 2012: 150).

While working on this research, we drew attention to the fact that there are three parts of science views about blogs. Some consider blogs separately from social networks. In their works they analyze blogs, but do not mention social networks and micro-blogs. This is for example E. Doroschuk and T. Staroverova (Doroschuk, Staroverova, 2017), which made monitoring of blogs in the structure of Internet media representations of the Republic of Tatarstan. But she analyzed only blogs on the Internet media. She says, that blog is an irreplaceable communication form for a media brand promotion. The blog is designed to provide the mobility of communication, organized by media, and attract new visitors. Blog is based on interactive media consumption practices.

The second part is those who analyze blogs and micro-blogs and compare them. For example, R. Yazdanifard and other says, that blogs are used as a tool to share daily experiences, opinions and commentary. Microblogging satisfies a need for an even faster and prompt mode of communication (Yazdanifard, 2011: 579). Distinctive to traditional online social applications, micro-blogs require small cognitive effort and help share real-time information about personal activities and interests (Allen et al, 2014: 106). D. Tayal and S. Komaragiri (Tayal, Komaragiri, 2009: 181) also compares blogs and microblogging, and talk about their prospects. And they come to the conclusion that microblog is a more reliable opportunity to predict the future performance of a company than blogs. D. Tayal and S. Komaragiri tried to investigate the potential micro-blogging for stock prediction. As the importance of the role of the sentiments posted on blogs has been well established, we perform a comparative study of the predictive power of blogs and micro-blogs. In our experiments, micro-blogs consistently outperformed blogs in their predictive capacity.

And the third group of scientists explores the micro-blogs of the rumor from traditional blogs (You et al., 2017: 1223; Liu et al, 2017: 876). X. Liu, Y. Jia, R. Jiang, Y. Quan (Liu et al, 2017) consider social networks, including micro-blogs like user influence based on users' behavior of forwarding micro blogs. M. Pushpalatha, A.V. Kathiravan (Pushpalatha, Kathiravan, 2014: 392) in his study worked on developing a ranking algorithm for web blogs using webometrics and sociometrics.

We believe that journalistic accounts that are in social networks (Facebook and Twitter) need to be called micro-blogging. We say different about blog and micro-blog. Micro-blog has number of characters allowed to communicate, writing style, but blogging has site updates at the discretion of the blogger while a micro-blogging site keeps updating minute by minute, efficiency etc. But blog and micro-blog have many similar to each other - free communication, saying opinion, information exchange, no restrictions on topics afford, greater flexibility and freedom of sharing content, unlike traditional blogs and other. So we can consider social network as a part of blogosphere and name journalistic account in social network as micro-blogs. Journalists mostly use social networks to share with readers important operational information when they have no ready material for the blog yet. They also advertise their blog and materials in it through social networks. With the development of social networks, many bloggers have left their online diaries and switched to social networks. These are, as a rule, those authors who did not write large materials.

V. Miller in one interview for iGeneration says about differs for journalist and blogger: "A journalist has a professional responsibility to verify information, check sources, print 'facts', portray the story from different viewpoints, and at least have a pretence of being 'objective'. Bloggers, by contrast, have no such professional responsibility or obligation. They can, within certain legal limits, print what they want without any obligation to verify sources or separate fact from opinion. The only obligation they have (if even that), is to maintain their audience" (Miller, Whittaker, 2009). We don't agree with him, because bloggers must check sources, print 'facts', because they inform audience, which trust him and propagate wrote information. Bloggers must have rresponsibility to verify information. V. Miller (Miller, Whittaker, 2009) says, that, only obligation bloggers have to maintain their audience. How they will save their audience if bloggers do not adhere the standards, check sources and spread untruth information. We convict, that bloggers even if they are not professional journalists must follow journalist standards.

Blog Structure

A blog may look like a ribbon on which with chronological order one by one are located so-called posts, according to the dates of their publication by the blogger. Since eventually a blog accumulates a lot of posts, usually this tape takes a few web pages so that the newest post is placed

at the top of the first page, and the older is post the lower it will be. Say, the first page contains all last week's posts; second page then devoted to posts a week before, the third page even more ancient, and so further. As a rule, blog pages also contain links to blog archives such as earlier posts, grouped by months and years. So the chronological blog navigation is very easy to use. (Chekmyshev, Yaroshenko, 2014: 27). Also, many blogging systems allow to assign categories for posts. These categories reflect the main topic of the posts, such as "Programming," "poetics," "family affairs" and so on. Then blog visitors who are interested in the blogger's thoughts on programming can refer to this category to go through all existing posts the author has devoted to this subject.

Typically, a separate post in a blog has a headline, the date of publication, actual content that consists of hypertext (author's thoughts, citations, etc.) links to other web sites and blogs, and sometimes images or even video. Also, the post includes comments left by visitors and a simple web form by which they attach these comments.

The History Of Blogging

The term "weblog" was the first time used by J. Barger on December 17, 1997. This way, he called the list of links generated automatically by the "Robot Wisdom" site that "logged" all the web pages visited by Jorn. So, the first blog was nothing more than a collection of links.

Short form of the term "blog" was first used by P. Merholz, who in his internet blog Peterme.com, for a joke splited the J. Barger's term "weblog" into two words "we blog". This happened in the spring of 1999. To blog - meant "to led a blog." Evan Williams coined the word "blogger", keeping in mind the person who is the author of the blog. He was able to register a fairly rare domain in.com zone - blogger.com. (Ukrainian blogosphere). The first to begin writing in cyrillic alphabet were Russians. Blogger "linker" became the first Russian-speaking user to register on Live Journal platform. This happened on November 27, 1999. After three days the user "at" created the first post in Russian.

The first Ukrainian blogs began appearing in the fall of 2006, which, possibly was related to LaSet's campaign "Create a Blog," with the help of which a few dozen people (the exact number is still unknown) have started their blogs and got domains in the free org.ua zone.

At the same time, Ukrainian LiveJournal users learned the blog creation within the limits of this service, although blogs as separate content-resources in the Ukrainian segment appeared much later. But in January 1, 2007, has appeared automated service Blog.Net.Ua, which gave a big push for users of Uanet. Today, Uanet is growing more actively than the Russian segment, which also develops at a rapid pace, but Uanet is still lagging behind the pace of propagation (Chabanenko, 2011: 45).

The number of blogs on the Internet is steadily increasing. The biggest is the English-speaking segment of the blogosphere, but the Japanese and the Chinese segments are approaching. Runet blogs take not more than 3% of international blogosphere.

Many journalistic enterprises use blogs as a new information disclosure technology (Fraga, Campos, 2015: 173). O.D. Kuznetsova (Kuznetsova, 2013:118) states: "When appeared in the late 1990's pp, first blogs were electronic diaries of website specialists; nobody even predicted that they would grow up to new media. The advent of web services for blogging in 1999 created great conditions for ordinary Internet users to have personal blogs. In the December 2001 this information phenomenon was called the blogosphere." (Kuznetsova, 2013: 119). For the last few years Ukrainian media increased the amount of blogs on their representatives in Internet. So the amount of journalistic blogs increased. Editorial offices encourage journalists to write blogs in online media.

The journalistic blog is a fairly common phenomenon in the blogosphere. Popular group Paparazzi in Live Journal has more than 7 thousand professional journalists. D.E. Kolizev (Kolizev, 2010) argues that historically, journalists represent a significant part of Russian blogosphere. This is due to the following reasons: journalists have a habit and ability to write, spend a lot of time on the Internet; they are communicative, etc.

Classification Of Blogs

Researchers have not yet come to a single conclusion regarding the classification of blogs. Some share blogs on personal (not intended for public reading and relate mainly to a personal matters life of the author - for example, what he eats and what places to visit) and themed (serious

blogs with a significant audience and in which rising important and painful questions that are now on time).

B. Hryvnak (Hryvnak, 2014) categorizes blogs by such criteria:

By an author (authors):

• personal (author, personal) blog - is being conducted by one person (usually his owner);

• "ghostly" blog - is conducted on behalf of someone else by indeterminate person;

• a collective or social blog - is conducted by a group of people for rules determined by the owner;

• corporate blog - is conducted by all employees of one organization;

By the presence of multimedia:

• text blog - blog, the main content of which are texts;

• photoblog is a blog, the main content of which is photos;

• music blog - blog, the main content of which is musical files;

• podcast and blog casting - blog, the main content of which is recorded and posted in as audio files , such as, MP3-file;

• video blog / blog - blog, the main content of which are video files;

By distinctive features of the content:

• content blog - is a type of blog that published an original author's text;

• microblogging is a blog with short, daily replies news from users' own lives;

• monitoring blog is a type of blog, the main content of which is to feature links to other sites or blogs that were commented about;

• quote blog is a blog whose main content is quotes from other blogs;

• a spam blog;

On a technical basis:

• stand-alone blog - blog on a separate hosting;

• blog on blog platform - a blog powered on blog services;

• mobile is a mobile blog which is being filled from mobile or portable devices.

This classification is unified for all blogs that are available on the Internet. Taking into account own research of the blogosphere, it is advisable to propose own classification that would help to differentiate journalists blogs from each other.

4. Results

Having investigated journalistic blogs, we offer the following classification: by a resource that features a blog: an own site, a section on the online mass media or platform for bloggers. Journalists for blogging create their sites or register on the online mass media resource or a blogging platform. By authors, journalistic blogs are divided into an author's and corporate (mass media journalists conduct blogs).

By the presence of multimedia: a text blog (the vast majority), photoblog, audio blog, video blog and mixed blogs type. Journalists, depending on their field of activity, often post their own works on blog pages. Journalists who work on the radio regularly post their broadcasts in audio format on their blog. Many TV journalists have created and run their blogs on the platform of YouTube.

By distinctive features of the content journalistic blogs can be divided into own content and someone else's. Most bloggers post their materials on their blogs, but sometimes journalists also post articles from their colleagues. So for example, N. Soloviev (http://volkmedia.info/) has a special category "Blogs," where he places articles from other authors published in mass media.

By a thematic focus, personal blogs usually cover the sphere of interests of the journalist. Journalists are not share with readers their thoughts on certain social problems, they tell and give recommendations in the areas where they work for a long time and may consider themselves to be specialists.

Therefore, for the thematic focus, journalistic blogs can be divided into:

1. Politics - blogs devoted to politics. Usually, political blogs are led by authors who are politicians and still do journalism.

2. Everyday life - blogs, which usually cover the issues of relationships between people, psychology, taking care of home issues - all that is connected with the concepts of "life," "personal life."

3. Travel - blogs in which authors share their impressions of their trips, advise how to behave in one or another country, tell about the traditions and customs of other people.

4. Economics - blogs where journalists analyze not only the contemporary state of the economy but also suggests expert opinions.

5. Fashion - blogs that discuss the latest in the fashion world, trends, fashion shows. Here you can read thoughts of professionals, tips from stylists and people who are not indifferent to fashion.

6. Music - blogs in which authors express their musical preferences, discuss the latest news in the world of music. Music blogs can be devoted to a certain musical direction, and can cover different musical genres and styles.

7. Informational analytical - blogs that contain relevant materials and analyze them.

8. Sports - blogs devoted to the coverage of sporting events and related topics.

9. Cinema - in such blogs, journalists write reviews and critique of different movies.

10. WEB - This category includes both SEO-blogs and blogs about the internet.

11. Health - A blog can cover a variety of topics related to ecology, health, such as nutrition and diets, fitness, weight control, diseases, illnesses, health analysis, researches in the field of protection health.

It is worth to broaden the classification of journalistic blogs with the types proposed by researcher D.E. Kolezev (Kolezev, 2010: 32).

1. In a blog, a journalist describes his private life and does not talk about professional activity (T. Kovalenko. URL: https://tetian.livejournal.com/).

• A blog can be of a mixed subject, where the author speaks about different topics including professional life (O. Kashyn. URL: https://echo.msk.ru/blog/kashin/).

• A blog where the author speaks only on professional topics, or topics that he highlights in his professional activities (M. Sokolov https://m-yu-sokolov.livejournal.com/)

• A blog that duplicates traditional media functions.

E.A. Kozhemyakin and A.A. Popov (Kozhemyakin, Popov, 2012: 148) give the following classification of journalism blogs:

1. An analytical blog that contains the author's interpretation and comments on particular problems and events (M. Sokolov. URL: https://m-yu-sokolov.livejournal.com/).

• The discussion blog is created not only to convey author's thoughts and views to readers but also to adjust the reverse connection with the audience, involve it in discussion of certain topics and problems (N. Radulova. URL: https://radulova.livejournal.com/).

• Blog of niche news, which is in the form of a diary in which are presented local and specialized topics and their discussions with readers. The main advantage of such a blog lies in the narrowness of the content when the author publishes material about events that are insignificant for large media (O. Plyushhev. URL: https://plushev.com/).

• Blog of news TV series, aimed at highlighting narrow themes. Each next post is a continuation of the previous one.

1. Image blog, which is another platform for well-known journalists to express themself without editorial censorship and processing. A distinctive feature of such type of blogging is a brand factor (V. Solovjov. URL: http://vrsoloviev.com/).

In Ukraine, journalistic blogs can be divided into the following post languages: Ukrainian and Russian-language blogs.

Let's take a closer look at the blogs that are published on the individual hostings.

Blog - as a personal mass media. Individual blogs are rare and often lose their activity after a year from the time of creation. It is because either such a blog embeds a lot of resources and time that exhaust the author, or they do not have enough ground to be competitive in the market along with popular editions.

On the other hand, individual blogs often cause more understanding by the public. Their authors are trying to publish as high quality and relevance materials as possible to attract readers. One of the most popular journalistic blogs in the world is considered to be American The Huffington Post - American Internet edition, aggregator, and blog for a known columnist. The site covers politics, business, entertainment, technology, and popular mass media tools, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy way of life, women's interests and local news.

The history of political blogs is often divided into periods before and after Huffington. When in 2005, millionaire A. Huffington (URL: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/arianna-huffington) decided to create a high-quality liberal blog from the ground, she has mocked. However, the blog quickly became popular and obtained a huge traffic. He has attracted many professional reviewers, columnists, and famous bloggers. It's launch was a landmark in the evolution of online blogging because it is showing that many of the old rules still apply to the new environments: a bit of professional marketing and "deep pockets" can win the audience even faster than trust. This case has helped bloggers get to the mass level, and taught new ways how to quickly and effectively involve the audience in the discussion of socially important questions. In the era before Huffington, major media companies ignored the blogosphere, or they were afraid of it; after Huffington, they began to treat it as another market that is open to investment and exploitation.

In Ukraine, this experience was taken over later and partly. Today, individual journalist news blogs almost do not exist, and it is mostly because the differentiation between the blog and Internet publications is rather small. So journalists think that it is better to have blog as a content of online media than to open blog on the separate platform. The reason for this is that in the majority of cases the publication does not require the authors to analyze and appraise the information that they give. Since the topic of freedom of speech is still not fully developed in the modern Ukrainian blogosphere, the publication of the usual informational materials attracts more investment and removes the responsibility of the authors for the published content. As a new media, individual journalist blogs are only beginning to invade the Ukrainian Internet space.

The resource of American journalist M. Malkin (http://michellemalkin.com/) is an excellent example of blogs that have all the characteristics of a journalistic blog and were conducted by a single person. M. Malkin is a great example to follow not only by the Ukrainian journalists but the entire female section of the journalistic space. Michelle acts as a conservative press columnist, as well as the author of one of the most visited conservative blogs in the United States. This makes her one of the most influential women on the Internet. The fact that makes her publication a blog, and not an Internet publication, is not only due to the private possession of the resource but the very design of the blog. He has been running since 2004 on the WordPress platform. On the "About Me" page, M. Malkin tells a few fun facts about herself, for example about her shoe size or her first car. The blog also has an archive where you can find the very first entries and a section with photos. It's also interesting that following the innovative technologies, the Malkin blog can be viewed in a separate, custom application Android gadgets or IOS platform.

Another blog that is worth of highlight is the R. Golubovsky (URL: https://zik.ua/author/roman_golubovskyy). He is known as the founder and editor of the site with the fake news articles UaReview. His blog covers analyzed and written in a humorous and fun way news and thoughts. As the author himself notes, all the texts and photographs are original -author's (otherwise the opposite is indicated). The blog is written in the Ukrainian language, and the first post in it was made in December 2008.

It is worth noting that bloggers earn their money by putting ads on their sites. For example, in the blog, D. Kazansky (URL: http://deniskazansky.com.ua/) in the section "Advertising in a blog" is posted information that "the attendance of the site at the moment is about 300-400 thousand users per month." And there are enclosed braces with numbers to confirm these words. Also, the blogger claims that the advertisement will be seen by visitors to the author's pages in Facebook and Vkontakte. "Coverage of the author's page on Facebook is 400-500 thousand users a week. The cost of an advertising post is 5000 hryvnias (approximately $ 200). It is also possible to place advertising banners. Their cost is negotiated individually". And there are some banner ads on the site.

Also, journalists use their sites to offer their services, for example, the blog of a Russian journalist S. Bednaruk (URL: https://bednaruk.wordpress.com/about/) contains the following message: "Looking for a commentator or a host for a car racing (and not only!) event? Need to write an article or a press release on racing topics? Contact me, always happy for cooperation. "Similar ads can also be found on other blogs. Journalists also actively promote their materials through their social networking sites.

Blog - as part of the mass media. While initially, some major foreign news organizations showed a futile initiative to launch blogs, they now catch up with a vast amount of offerings. For example, the New York Times, which began with the blog of former TV presenter D. Kaveta and

went to being the innovative forum blog of the Times columnist, N. Kristof. Regular journalists write some blogs, and freelancers or just bloggers create others. For example, B. Stelter, CNN's senior correspondent, and lead Reliable Sources works on both media, spending half of his time on publishing materials in a press release and half on blog posts. As B. Stelter pointed out: "The biggest difference between blogging in the Times and creating the publication on TVNewser is the editorial review of the material before publishing it." (Glaser, 2008).

Many Internet publications in Ukraine and the world (for example, Ukrayinska Pravda, Correspondent, Zaxid.net) have the category "Blogs." The very fact of the presence of the category "Blogs" on the website of the Internet publication indicates the understanding of the editors the role of blogging in the Internet environment. And the participation of journalists in the creation of blogs - shows that they contain professional media content and are designed for a wide range of readers.

A large number of independent blogs and publications contain unverified information, disseminating rumors and propaganda, while blogs on the site of the online edition have the status of the media, and therefore bloggers must adhere to professional journalistic standards (Tonkikh, 2012: 290). Therefore, recognizing blogs as part of an online publication contributes to increasing user trust in information, thus opening up space for active influence on public opinion. K. Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko, 2011) states: "The journalist's blog is interesting due to the fact that the author is widely known, has public confidence and creates special corporate relations with audience, based on curiosity about details, opportunities for informal discussion, assessment, criticism" (Yevtushenko, 2011). According to its genre, journalistic blogs resemble author's columns, which are often found in newspapers and magazines. However, there are at least two significant differences.

The first is that the authors of blogs on the pages of well-known media have personal access to this section of the site and publish the edited by themselves materials there, without external interference.

The second difference is quantitative. A traditional newspaper could afford one or two author's columns. Instead, there are about fifty bloggers of the Ukrayinska Pravda. Every day there are at least 3-5 new publications of this category. Special occasions may force several dozen bloggers to share with the world their thoughts and views, as there are no quantitative restrictions, as opposed to traditional media, in Internet journalism.

This indicates that it can't be argued that blogs under the same category name of well-known Internet publications complement professional journalism. Such materials today are an organic and a part of the Internet media.

E. Doroschuk and T. Staroverova (Doroschuk, Staroverova, 2017) argue that a blog in the structure of Internet media representations promotes the representation of various cultural traditions in the information environment of the Internet, social interaction, the scope of information retrieval expansion, the promotion of a media brand, the enhancement of communication subjectivity by the creation of online communities in blogs and dispersed, complex links. A blog is used for the self-organization of subjects - as for author journalists with the pages in social networks and entering into various groups in these networks, so as for the users - the representatives of the audience who take part in content creation. A blog is a transitional format to transform traditional forms of communication into the multimedia communication of news brands.

Blogs not only play a role in changing the way traditional journalists do their work, but they are also becoming more and more a part of the business of traditional media. D. Robinson, the editor of Greensboro News & Record, says News & Record blogs have 7.2% of traffic from page views on their site, while The journalist B. Denis said his blogging was gaining about 5% of site traffic. While these numbers seem to be scanty, they are huge, given that these sites did not have blogs just a few years ago. (Glaser, Mark, 2008).

Among the Ukrainian blogs that were created on the initiative of the famous editions or are their part, the most popular among readers are the sites Korrespondent, Ukrayinska Pravda, Novynar, Gazeta.ua, 24tv.ua, TSN, Tyzhden.ua and others.

R.K. Nielsen (Nielsen, 2012: 959) is convinced that blogging ought to be in each organization.

Blog on blog platforms. In addition to the media, journalists share their thoughts on other platforms, often on blog platforms. The most famous are LiveJournal, Blogger", AlterVista, WordPress.com, BlogSome, Blogdrops, Noiblogger and more.

These are sites where there are only blogs. One of the first such projects on the Ukrainian blog space is Ukrainian Blog. Another corporate blog is UAINFO. The Ukrainian Internet publication, which is designed to accumulate the most important information from Ukrainian and foreign blogs and social networks, develop and maintain an independent Ukrainian blogosphere. According to the structure and design, it has all the features of a journalistic blog. The site is devoted to social, political, economic topics, as well as support for investigations conducted by bloggers, technical issues of the blogosphere and social networks.

E.A. Kozhemyakin and A.A. Popov (Kozhemyakin, Popov, 2012: 150) interviewed journalists and found out that bloggers helped them in their professional activities (46 %), with which they began to work better and more efficiently. 32 % of interviewed journalists say that blogs do not affect their professional activity. Only 22 % noted that blogs had changed their activities to the worst side. 17 % of journalists admitted that in the new conditions they lose interest in the profession, and 33 % of journalists, on the contrary, grew.

To find out whether the audience reads and trusts the journalists' blogging media, we surveyed 1,000 respondents of different ages and levels of education.

The survey showed that the audience of the Ukrainian blogosphere is mostly people from 23 to 50 years old. These are the active users of the Internet. Also, you can follow the trend that most bloggers also fall into this age category. Often, users choose blogs by the age of the author, hoping for clarity and relevance of his publications for themselves.

For the vast majority of respondents, it is not crucial whether the blogger they are reading is a journalist or an ordinary expert. Essential for them is how easy, accessible and impartial he treats a certain problem. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of the respondents was difficult to answer the question of whether they read the blogs of the journalists themselves.

The overwhelming majority of respondents read blogs regularly and for a long time now. This practically confirms the theoretical basis of the fact that in today's society blogs are a popular phenomenon. According to static data, millions of Ukrainians visit various Internet media daily, and at the same time their blogs on their platforms. This testifies to the thirst of the population of the country to receive prompt, up-to-date and truthful information.

The vast majority of our respondents (77 %) read blogs of journalists in the Internet media, another 21% - on special platforms for blogs, only 2% of respondents read blogs that have separate hosts.

As for the topic of the blog, 32 % read blogs that contain information on politics, 17 % - blogs where the economic theme is raised, 22 % - sports, 15 % - about health, and the remaining respondents prefer blogs on other topics.

What interests people in blogs is the ability to interest the reader, a good selection of topics, an easy and accessible presentation of the problem, and the use of multimedia technologies (videos, audio recordings, and photos).

56 % of respondents favor journalistic blogs that are informational and analytical. 7 % - to blogs-diaries, where the authors tell about their own experiences. The rest of the respondents prefer mixed blogs, where the author talks about his professional problems, shares his own published and unpublished material with the audience and shares his problems, personal life events, etc.

Most readers will learn about the blogger just from his posts in social networks. So 77 % of the respondents found "their" blogger, 6 % were recommended to follow the blogger by friends, 3 % caught on the blog with the help of search services, where they used keywords on specific topics. 4 % originally read journalists in the author's columns, which were posted in traditional media, and subsequently went online. 10 % "accidentally" stumbled upon a blogger in the Internet-wide Web and became his or her regular readers.

Traditional media actively use information from blogs. Thus, live bloggers testimonials were very valuable to journalists during the US-Iraq (2003) and the Georgian-Ossetian conflicts in 2008, the natural cataclysm - the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans (2005), the flood in Thailand (2004), the London Metro bombing, and so on. During the Iranian revolution, the microblogging network Twitter was, in fact, the only source of information on events in the country. Powerful

media were obscene on comments, and opposition sites were thoroughly blocked. The rebellious people went out on the streets and took photos of what they saw around on mobile phones and posted everything on special sites. The diaries featured a large number of eyewitness records -something that thousands of professional reporters could not get (Sazonov, 2010).

After the next political coup in Kyrgyzstan (April 2010), the well-known Kyrgyz journalist I. Azar (Azar, 2010) openly acknowledged that "the Kyrgyz revolution in 2010 was the first real confrontation between journalists and bloggers on the battlefield. It is already clear that we are losing to the efficiency and saturation of the events online, and we (micro) bloggers have won."

Today, it is not so important where a blogger places his material - in a blog, or on an online publication website, since distributing information about the blog, will still be done through social networks.

Among such blogger-journalists is D. Riznychenko. On the Wikipedia page, you can see a link to his Facebook page, which is also called D. Riznychenko's blog. On his page, the journalist shares his thoughts about various events in the world of Ukrainian politics and economy, news in his own professional and personal life, posts photos, and videos, actively communicates with readers, and even posts full journalistic materials, waiting for the audience to react quickly.

Publications by D. Riznychenko mostly have a journalistic and analytical character, but the news reports, the journalist reposts from other information resources and only adds his opinion.

5. Conclusion

A blog for a journalist is, first of all, an opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to clearly state their position, while avoiding subjectivity, since the author's point of view in blog publishing is crucial. The form of a diary allows you to keep the frank position of subjectivity and the expressiveness of judgments, which provides a wide range of opportunities for influencing public opinion. In a blog, a journalist is obliged to adhere to one of the basic principles of journalistic creativity - objectivity. The form of the diary allows you to share your thoughts, emotions, observations, use of spoken vocabulary, ironic and sarcastic statements, valuations, and so on. Blog posts are different from journalistic materials that are published in traditional media or on the pages of online publications due to more freedom in formulating opinions.

N. Weiss-Blatt (Weiss-Blatt, 2016: 415) claims that bloggers strive to be the opinion leaders, so blogging journalism standards are required to achieve this.

The popularity of journalistic blogs is due, first, to freedom of speech, interactivity, and convergence of media on the Internet. Since the blog's author often acts as a collector of information, writer, and editor, the material is published in its original form, without editorial changes, and with the ability to express what is on the mind. It also enables the author to track the reaction of readers, respond to their comments and be open to new information.

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