News Presentation of Teen Opinion Leaders in Blogs: Themes, Forms, Communications

News Presentation of Teen Opinion Leaders in Blogs: Themes, Forms, Communications Social networking websites provide variable opportunities to state opinions on private and civic matters and to spread news to a large range of associates. The present research aims to identify the peculiarities of news presentation of teen opinion leaders in blogs. This research examines the news presenting behaviors and attitudes of teen bloggers, an understudied field in the research on youth and news media. Founded on the content analysis of the most current blogs’ content, it discusses how adolescents, acting as opinion leaders, inform about current events and why they give preference to selected number of news formats. The results reveal the ways and forms news information is being accessed, new attitudes about what it implies to be informed, and a youth priority for dogmatic rather than factual news. Introduction Recent developments in the media landscape have led to renewed interest in the idea of teen opinion leadership (Choi, 2015; Schäfer & Taddicken, 2015). In the middle of the 20th century Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) described a two-way character of contact stream in which opinion leaders received news from the media environment and passed them along to their acquaintances. This process of influencing peers and directing their attention to specific topics and views is now also possible in current social media applications, for example, blogging. Blogging as an interactive form of publishing content on the web offers various opportunities to express opinions on individual or public events and raise awareness of specific topics. While blogs were originally seen as a tool for social relationships, recent research recognized that they also perform as sources of information (Bode, 2016; Choi, 2016) and a meeting place for social rendition and assistance (Gil de Zúñiga, Copeland, & Bimber, 2014).