| Political blogs, an increasingly popular form of online communications, facilitate the mass in expressing opinions and participating in political affairs. With the emergence of a large amount of political blogs and the act of political blogging, the politics of the society has been greatly influenced.As owners of political blogs, political bloggers are crucial in the communications of political blogging. Who are political bloggers in contemporary China? What are the characteristics of these bloggers? Why do they use political blogs? A deep understanding of group characteristics, user behaviors and motivations of these political bloggers will help us form a comprehensive perspective into political blogs and political blogging in contemporary China, which is of great importance in constructing a healthy public opinion.Despite this increasing popularity, however, political bloggers received little attention in the field of communications science. This paper attempts to address the above-mentioned questions by doing two things. First, I review former studies in this field and try to form the theoretical basis for this paper by discussing definitions, characteristics, user behaviors and effects of political blogs.Second, I use content analysis and in-depth interview to analyze Top 50 popular political blogs and their bloggers of People's Daily Online and attempt to address three questions: (1) how political bloggers use their blogs? (2) how political bloggers use blog articles to report news? (3) which factors and motivations influence an individual's decision to engage in political blogging?This paper analyzes the group characteristics, user behaviors and motivations of political bloggers and finds out that political bloggers in contemporary China present four characteristics of political communicators: (1) they have a political orientation; (2) they are a special elite group; (3) they have a desire to control audiences and the media; (4) they are willing to interact with communicatees. |
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