I’m very pleased to announce that my research paper for Journalism Practice on blogging at the BBC is available online.

“The Blogging BBC: Journalism blogs at ‘the world’s most trusted news organisation’” has been posted online months ahead of the print edition of the journal via Taylor & Francis’ iFirst online publication system.

The system “makes new knowledge available to researchers in the shortest possible time”. This tackles one of the issues in academic publishing, which can be mean research not being published for months or possibly years after it was completed.

The paper explores how the BBC sought to normalise the emergent media format of blogging to conform with established professional values of impartiality and accuracy.

It shows how senior BBC correspondents have embraced the notion of the blog as a delivery system for journalistic elements that do not fit within established broadcast news, seeing blogging as a way to offer content that complements broadcast output, albeit in a more personal and informal tone.

But the study suggests that BBC News has been less adept at incorporating the conversational and social nature of blogging, a shortcoming acknowledged by BBC editors.

The full paper is only available to subscribers with electronic access to Journalism Practice but here’s the abstract to give you a taste of the research:

Blogging has shifted from an activity largely taking place outside established media to a practice appropriated by professional journalists. This study explores how BBC News has incorporated blogging in its journalism, looking at the internal debates that led to the adoption of blogs and charting how they became a core part of the corporation’s news output. Using a case study approach, it examines the impact of blogging on BBC editorial values and considers how journalists have sought to maintain their authority in a digital media environment by integrating a new form of journalism within existing norms and practices. The BBC offers a unique case study as its long-standing editorial values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness appear at odds with the notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated. The research reveals that blogs emerged initially as an activity peripheral to the main newsgathering functions of the organisation and were rapidly transformed into key mechanisms for communicating analysis and commentary to the public. It contends that, for now, blogging has had a greater impact on the style, rather than substance, of BBC journalism. While the systems whereby journalists deliver information have evolved, the attitudes and approaches have, so far, remained relatively static.