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King’s Research Portal Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Moore, M. J. E., & Ramsay, G. N. (2016). Digital Agenda-Setting: Measuring mainstream and social media influence during the UK 2015 election campaign. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, 13(1), 21-29. http://journals.communicationethics.net/ Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. 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The following week Gordon Ramsay he increased the number of his transport and infrastructure commitments and their specifici- ty. ‘We will improve junction 25 of M5, upgrade Devon link road, start planning new station between Castle Cary & Taunton,’ Osborne tweeted on Tuesday 28 April, nine days before the UK General Election (Osborne 2015c). Osborne’s tweets in the fortnight before the General Election were clearly not acciden- tal. They appeared to be part of a carefully planned strategy to make direct infrastructural Digital agenda- commitments to specific geographic areas. It is not known whether the local Conservative setting: Measuring candidates then used these commitments on the doorstep, but Osborne certainly gave them mainstream and concrete pledges with which to woo voters, and social media material for their local paper in the days lead- ing up to the election. We also know, looking influence during the at the tweets from previous weeks, that these infrastructural tweets were anomalous. Before UK 2015 election Monday 20 April, Osborne was, like most candi- campaign dates from the leading parties, publishing gen- eral tweets only a handful of times a day. This paper examines the setting up and man- aging of ‘Election Unspun’, an experimental We know about Osborne’s tweets because we news content analysis project, and its main – the small team at Election Unspun – followed findings. In the end, the project collected every them. We did not just follow Osborne’s tweets tweet from more than 3,000 political actors but all 68,974 tweets of the 497 Conservative and influencers, analysed the national news- candidates we could identify on Twitter from papers’ coverage and websites of ITV News, Monday 30 March to polling day on Thursday Sky News and Channel 4 News and the UK ver- 7 May. We followed another 560 Labour can- sions of the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed Poli- didates (and their 128,627 tweets), more than tics during the 2015 general election campaign 1,300 other candidates from smaller parties, in the UK. It concludes that, despite the pleth- and over 700 political influencers on Twitter. In ora of media platforms available, 2015 was a total this added up to more than one million top down, stage-managed campaign. From the tweets during the campaign. statements, tweets and party political material published by the parties, the party leaders, and Despite this vast number of tweets, Twitter the candidates it was clear that both the Con- was our secondary focus during the UK 2015 servatives and Labour were eager to talk about election campaign. Our primary focus was the the economy, and the press largely followed mainstream media. From the websites of the their lead. national press, public service broadcasters, and major online news sites such as Huffington Post Keywords: digital agenda setting, UK General and Buzzfeed, we collected data on approxi- Election, media content analysis mately a quarter of a million news articles, from across sixteen news outlets from the beginning Introduction of 2015 through to the May election. On Tuesday 21 April 2015, George Osborne published an unusually detailed tweet for a We published the findings of our data driven Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘We will help analysis of media coverage of the UK election fund road improvements in Eastleigh, includ- online at www.electionunspun.com and in two ing Chickenhall Link Road and Botley bypass, subsequent publications – UK election 2015: and junction 6 of the M27’ (Osborne 2015a). Setting the agenda (Moore and Ramsay 2015) A few days later he told his Twitter followers and Election unspun: Political parties, the press, about ‘Our plan for the West Midlands: £50bn and Twitter during the 2015 election campaign in HS2 and extending Enterprise Zone to cover (Moore et al. 2015). the regeneration area around Curzon St sta- PAPER Copyright 2016-1. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13 No 1 2016 21 Martin Moore This paper explains how we set up and man- geologist who, amongst other things, discov- Gordon Ramsay aged ‘Election Unspun’, an experimental news ered that fossils did not fall from the sky (as content analysis project using software we many of his contemporaries believed), but were developed expressly for the purpose, and its instead the accretion of once-living organisms. main findings. It was a project conceived in the As Nicholas Steno made discoveries in layers of light of the enormous possibilities for large- rock laid down over millennia, so – our thinking scale news analysis offered by advances in pro- went – Steno, the research tool, would discover cessing power, data storage, analytical tools, patterns in layers of news articles laid down day and the explosion of information in a digi- after day. tal age. With a relatively small team, modest resources, and some programming expertise, it Part content collector, and part analytical tool, is now possible to undertake news analysis proj- Steno can be aimed at news websites, from ects on a scale unimaginable a just a few years which it will collect every article published, as ago. By explaining ‘Election Unspun’, we hope well as logging important metadata about each to show how new researchers might experi- article – who wrote it, when it was published, ment with new methods of content analysis on the headline and URL, and so on. This content is large digital datasets. then stored in a structured database for retriev- al. Provide Steno with the dates you would like Content analysis: Analogue to digital to analyse, and it will provide every news article News content analysis used to be, and in many published by your chosen news sources on each cases still is, a very time-consuming process. In chosen date. A desktop application then allows the days of print-only newspapers – and today researchers to perform queries on the resulting still, in non-digitised archives – it could mean sample of articles. spending weeks in a newspaper library por- ing over kilometres of microfiche. Video or Ultimately, Steno is intended for targeted anal- audio analysis could involve spooling through ysis of news coverage of specific policy areas. piles of VHS tapes, audio cassettes, or delicate However, since the 2015 General Election cam- (and sometimes disintegrating) reel-to-reel paign provided a unique opportunity to see film. Before the use of spreadsheet and sta- whether a small research team using Steno tistical analysis packages, results would need could deal with the complexities of monitor- to be hand-calculated. The usual constraints ing the entire range of party policy platforms, of time and money ensured that such content we decided not just to cover the election as a analysis projects were either limited in scope, whole, but to analyse election coverage on an or very expensive and required a small army of ongoing week-by-week basis, making all the researchers. More recently, print news content findings and data available online (via www. analysis has been made somewhat easier by electionunspun.net). Once we knew that our the collections of commercial companies such analysis worked on our sample of mainstream as Factiva or Gorkana, but again large-scale media outlets, we decided to add a Twitter analyses using these resources require a lot of analysis component and started collecting every manual counting and transferring of data to, tweet from more than 3,000 political actors and for example, SPSS for analysis (Ramsay 2014), influencers. and charge expensive subscriptions. Though source material is far easier to collate using Doing Election Unspun taught us a lot. For these techniques, analysis can still be extremely example, we learned about the dynamics of time-consuming. the relationship between parties, press, Twitter and broadcast news – particularly the intimate There is something a little incongruous about relationship Twitter has with broadcasting. We manually counting digital information and learnt about the bizarre inefficiencies of online going through several stages of gathering publishing – for instance, that a shortlink in a and preparing data to transfer to Excel or SPSS tweet can link to up to 10 different shortlinks before even rudimentary quantitative analysis before reaching the original URL.

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