Opinion makers
According to the website BlogItalia, which ranks blogs using Google PageRank and the Google Links algorithms, the top ten Italian blogs at the beginning of 2016 were: Beppegrillo.it (created by Beppe Grillo, the founder and charismatic leader of the Five Star Movement), Blog.debiase.com (Luca De Biase), FiNeX, BlogItalia, Nazione Indiana, Nothing2Hide, Mantelblog, ItaliaSW, Quinta Weblog, and Il Cavoletto di Bruxelles. Three of these are personal blogs, five are devoted to the computer and internet world, one is a generalist blog, and one is focused on food. No official data are available on the average number of visits per blog.
Facebook and Twitter are readily employed by journalists; indeed, studies have shown that journalists are among the most frequent users of Twitter. On these platforms, journalists constitute a sort of a self-referential community, which is able to influence the editorial choices of the legacy media thorough a diffused framework of e – interactions (Bentivegna - ,Marchetti, forthcoming).