This study investigated citizen participation in live blogs in the changing media ecosystem from the public sphere perspective. The live blog is a web-native, participatory-oriented journalistic genre comprised of brief updates of an event in motion and designed to deliver real-time information from multiple sources about breaking news and scheduled events. To examine participation in this contemporary news format, the current, exploratory study, collected survey responses from 339 volunteers and found that participation was not a motivating factor for readers to engage in live blogging on a deeper level. Other study findings pertaining to participation were also pessimistic, showing that the majority of participants were not personally interested in participating in live blogging. This is an important finding for digital journalism as it implies that the capacity of online platforms to accommodate participation does not necessarily translate into citizens’ willingness to participate.

这项研究从公共领域的角度调查了公民在不断变化的媒体生态系统中参与实时博客的情况。实时博客是一种基于网络的，面向参与者的新闻类型，由正在活动的事件的简短更新组成，旨在提供来自多个来源的有关突发新闻和预定事件的实时信息。为了检查这种当代新闻格式的参与程度，当前的探索性研究收集了339名志愿者的调查反馈，并发现参与并不是促使读者更深入地参与实时博客的动机。与参与有关的其他研究结果也很悲观，表明大多数参与者对参与实时博客并不感兴趣。