A study of the European Journalism Observatory conducted by Marco Faré and Francesco Uboldi, presents an updated scenario on the progressive integration between blogs and traditional journalism.
The study identifies an 18-34 age group consuming more online information, relying less and less on traditional media.
Blogging is described as a phenomenon in it’s infancy but growing at a rapid pace with thousands of new blogs going live every day.
Blog readers are found to spend an average of 23 hours per week compared to 13 ours of a traditional internet user (i.e. One who does not read blogs).
2% of UK users own a blog and 10% of the online population read blogs regularly. It is interesting to note how bloggers have become opinion leaders and how blogs have become a reference point for the develpoment of traditional media news.
In France 15.000 new blogs go live every day and 1 in 25 French own a blog. French are now writing 1 million posts per day and are attracting marketing investments. French blogs are now in the order of 6 to 7 million (4,5 million are on sky-blog.fr), but only 15 are identified as “influential”.
Similar trends are identified in Italy and Switzerland, although reliable statistics are not available for these countries.
The study reveals a much slower growth rate in Germany where the number of blogs is considerably smaller that France and the UK.
Italian Journalists are found to be heavy blog users (2 out of 3 interviewed declared to read blogs daily) and believe blogs will have a significant impact on traditional media.
As far as Italy is concerned the study concludes that blogging as a business model is still unstable and can attract marketing investments when blogs are aggregated in specialised networks (similar to web rings).
Sante J. Achille
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