This page carried the conference paper The BBC Goes Blogging: Is ‘Auntie’ Finally Listening?, presented by Alfred Hermida at the Online Journalism Symposium in April 2008 and offered as a PDF download.
The study asked how the world’s largest news organisation had tried to incorporate blogging into its journalism — both as a format for new journalistic thinking and as a platform for greater accountability and transparency. It covered seven years, from 2001 to 2008, the period in which the BBC came under intense scrutiny over its journalism and over its mechanisms for public accountability. Three kinds of evidence were used: internal and public policy documents produced by the corporation, blog content published on BBC and personal websites, and the personal recollections of senior editors.
The finding was a tension rather than a verdict. The BBC was approaching blogging as a tool for building trust with audiences through expanded transparency and accountability, an attempt to move away from what the paper described as a historically elitist attitude towards those audiences. At the same time it was struggling to fit the format inside long-established journalistic norms and practices, seeking to normalise blogs within the frameworks it already had.
That second half of the argument — a large newsroom absorbing an outside format by making it conform — has outlasted blogging itself as a description of how legacy organisations take on new formats.