Beyond Agenda Setting: The Role of Political Blogs as Sources in Newspaper Coverage of Government

This paper contributes to this literature on how "new media" is influencing "old media" by tracking references to an extensive list of high profile political blogs in stories run by four national print media outlets between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2008. The findings presented here show that although journalists frequently rely on political bloggers to serve as sources in their coverage of politics, they only reference certain political blogs in certain ways on certain kinds of issues. To be more precise, journalists seem to turn to political blogs primarily during national election campaigns and this turn is frequently in the direction of a small number of liberal political blogs - who are referenced more often and more prominently than conservative blogs.