Abstract: Online journalism, civic journalism, and social media in Bulgaria altogether have been going through a dramatic development in the latest decades. Blogs are dynamically expanding platforms for web writing and sharing. The blogs of two Bulgarian journalists, Ivo Indzhev and Ivan Bedrov, are analysed in the present paper from a rhetorical standpoint. The main concepts which are considered in the article are connected with the concepts of civic journalism, blogs, argumentation technique and stylistic figures viewed as generators and engines of ideas and opinions in the web environment. The comments and posts reviewed are interpreted and analysed from a general rhetorical perspective and one of the main objectives of this research is to select and describe the similarities and differences between comments and traditional rhetorical genres e.g. diatribes or denunciation speeches. The blogs of these two journalists are analysed further from a virtual rhetoric point of view: visual elements and text are combined to enhance the effect of a coherent message body which is approached as a part of the process of creating and broadcasting of the authors’ messages. The investigation is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis and the aim is to determine the individual features and characteristics of the posts of the two bloggers.
Keywords: virtual rhetoric, blogs, civic journalism, arguments, figure of speech.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 14, October 2012, rhetoric.bg/, ISSN 1314-4464