Browsing by Author "Airaskorpi, Aurora"

In the second millennium, the number of blogs, alongside with other user-generated content has grown explosively all over the globe. In Finland, blogs have a strong foothold in the genre of lifestyle media. Bloggers have become independent media entrepreneurs and they have also been employed by media companies. Lifestyle blogs and women’s magazines intersect in many respects. One of the most important intersections is their readership. Many magazine readers read blogs and some have also replaced magazine reading with blog reading. The aim of this study was to find out why the reader’s relationship with lifestyle blogs is different from her relationship with women’s magazines and what implications this may have for the future of lifestyle media. The field of lifestyle blogs has thus far not been widely researched and very little is still known about the reading practices of blogs. In this thesis I compare the reading of blogs with the reading of women’s magazines. I study the role of the blogosphere by examining previous literature about women’s magazines, user-generated content and blogging as a phenomenon. I examine the reader-relationship of blogs from the point of view of journalistic professionalism, in the sense that it applies to women’s magazines; as well as authenticity, a concept previously associated with representations of ordinary people in the media. For my empirical analysis I have conducted a reader-study of the readers of the Finnish Costume magazine. The participants of my study were females from 16 to 32 of age. I employed a set of mixed methods to study the relationship that these readers had with blogs and magazines. My main findings in this study were that the reading of women’s magazines is motivated by the professionalism of magazine journalists whereas lifestyle blog reading is motivated by the perceived authenticity of the blogger. As such, blogs and magazines appear to fulfil two different functions. I also discovered that some of the reading practices previously associated with magazines have been transferred as such to blogs but some of them have been highlighted or reshaped by the reading of blogs. A key implication of this study is that blogs and magazines remediate each other and reshape the expectations that readers have of the lifestyle media genre.