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How Can Press Releases from Ngos Affect the News Agenda?

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How Can Press Releases from Ngos Affect the News Agenda? How can press releases from NGOs affect the news agenda? Greenpeace and WWF’s Agenda-Building strategy 11632488 Jou I Chen Master’s Thesis Graduate School of Communication Erasmus Mundus Journalism Supervisor: Sabine Geers Date of completion: June 2, 2019 1 How can press releases from NGOs affect the news agenda? Greenpeace and WWF’s Agenda-Building strategy Abstract Environmental nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) put their effort into many issues such as wildlife, climate, plastic wastes, air pollution, forest, oceans, energy, fresh Water, food and so on. To advocate for their ideals, NGOs employ agenda-building strategy to convey their messages on as many media platforms as they can. The current study aims to understand the impact of several variables from press releases, one of the formats of information subsidies, and how can environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF use it to influence the news agenda of news outlets. The finding shows that the human testimony from PR professionals or other staff of the organizations and the statistics or research results provided by the NGOs could somehow help them building the news agenda, but differences can be seen between our two target organizations. Nevertheless, the salience of issues in press releases from Greenpeace or WWF are found not positively related to the salience of issues in news articles. To further explain our findings, theoretical and practical implications are analyzed in the discussion part. Keywords environmental issues, agenda building, WWF, Greenpeace, press release Introduction It is not rare that journalists use massive amounts of information from public relations materials like press releases, brochures, speeches, annual reports in their articles. To save more budget as the shrinkage of circulation and readers getting serious, they tend to form a story based on sources outside the newsroom instead of investing time and cost to interview and investigate on their own (Lewis, Williams & Franklin, 2008). This tendency thus gives NGOs a chance to shape the news agenda as an information provider, especially when compared with PR materials from the corporation, media workers prefer sources from agencies “with no obvious self- 2 serving purpose” (Curtin, 1999). To NGOs, able to affect the news content and be covered widely is important since it is an efficient way to deliver their messages, gain supporters, persuade the public and even further influence policymakers. (Waisbord, 2011) To understand the relationship between PR materials from nonprofit organizations and media attention, the study takes two of the biggest international environmental organizations as research objects. Greenpeace for example, founded in 1971, activating in over 55 countries with 2.8 million members worldwide, it conducts “research, lobbying, communication strategies and quiet diplomacy” as their means to pursue their goals regarding environment protection. (Greenpeace European Unit, n.d.) Similar but not the same, the Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has over five million supporters around the world, instead of frequently launches the campaign activities like Greenpeace does, they devoted directly to actual fieldwork such as preserving landscapes, saving endangered species, increasing sustainable use of natural resources and so on. However, both of them have used media to advocate their action and attract the public’s attention, a process so-called agenda building. In detail, they carry out the strategy of “source professionalization” (Blumler, 1990), that is, hiring PR professionals to take charge of publishing news releases, holding press conferences, keeping a good relationship with journalists, running social media accounts and so on. The dominant position of sources in the news coverages can be explained by Gandy’s (1982) instrumental concept of “information subsidies”. He issues that through the employment of sourcing strategies, “the subsidy giver” raises the probability of their messages to be used by “reducing the costs faced by journalists in satisfying organizational requirement” (p.62), which then influence the news content. On the one hand, a few studies suggest that NGOs can obtain media exposure by meeting the “journalistic logic”, such as offering “dramatic, conflict-driven and celebrity news” (Waisbord, 2011, p.145). On the other hand, other research found that 3 accuracy and credibility are of substance for NGOs to earn more spaces in the news articles (Krøvel, 2012; Kwenda, 2013; Mcpherson, 2016). However, many studies with regard to agenda building put emphasis on political public relations and corporate communication, only a few of them have taken care of “how civil actors such as NGOs seek to build the media’s agenda” (Yang & Saffer 2018, p.424) This is the gap this study aims to fill, with special focus on certain aspects of press releases and to what extent can those elements influence the news content by asking the following research question: What factors in press releases from environmental NGOs Greenpeace and WWF can affect the news agenda? By carrying out quantitative content analysis and examining the coverages from British outlets The Guardian and The Telegraph as well as the press releases from Greenpeace and WWF under the time frame of two years from January 2017 to December 2018, specific attention will be given to three elements in the press releases to answer the research question, namely, the human testimony from PR professionals and NGO workers; The salience of issues in news releases and the statistics or research results provided by NGOs. Hoping to find out how can press releases from environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF obtain more media exposure to promote their ideals. Agenda Building Theory: Agenda Setting from PR perspective Agenda setting theory asserts that public opinion can be shaped by media when certain issues been stressed over others. People are more likely to consider issues that acquire more media exposure as more important ones (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). In other words, agenda setting mainly concentrates on how media transfer the salience of issues to the public (Kim & Kiousis, 2012; Yang & Saffer, 2018), expanding from this concept, many scholars further asking “who, or what, sets the media’s agenda” (Turk & Franklin, 1987, p. 29). As Gandy (1982) points out, 4 “I suggest we go beyond agenda-setting to determine who sets the media agenda, how and for what purpose it is set, and with what impact on the distribution of power and values in society” (p. 266), which refers to agenda building, a theory widely discussed in the field of public relations and defined as the ‘‘overall process of creating mass media agendas’’ (Berkowitz & Adams, 1990, p. 723). As the public relations’ aspect of agenda setting theory, agenda building has contributed to what various types of organizations can do to reach their goals of raising attention on certain issues by gaining more media exposure. Dutton (1986) states, agenda building is a strategy to distribute attention and catch decision makers’ eyes in the organization, in order to “make an issue consensual, legitimate and resource consuming.” (p.4) Attempts to explain how agenda building process employed between issues in PR materials and media coverages, Corbett and Mori (1999) take breast cancer as an example, first the issue was discussed in the public arena, next interest groups took part in the discussion to present their position via PR materials, then their opinion eventually affected the news media and the mass. Nevertheless, PR practitioners are considered rather passive and need to wait for an appropriate opportunity to get involved in the discourse (Corbett and Mori, 1999). In contrast, see agenda building as “the salience of the issues that the organization is communicating about (or the organization itself)” (p. 658), Kim and Kiousis (2012) believe PR materials can play a positive role in shaping the media agenda, they issue that there are two levels of agenda building, the first level put emphasis on “the transfer of object (i.e., issues, political figures, or organizations) salience among public relations messages, media coverage, and public opinion”(p.659), and public relations professional can raise media and public concern towards particular objects by offering information relevant to it. At the second level, PR practitioners play an important role in framing objects, which would alter how media and public perceive an object. As Carroll & McCombs (2003) explain, “At the first level, agenda-setting effects are on attention. At the 5 second level, agenda-setting effects are on comprehension” (p.38), the goal is to make the news content reflects same position and characteristics as what supplied in the PR materials. Information Subsidies Before further explore different aspects of agenda building strategies in political public relations, corporate communications and the focal point of our study- agenda building strategies of NGOs, it is necessary to introduce the concept of information subsidies first, since it is of the essence in the process of agenda building, various studies have proven that positive connection exists between news agenda and public relations messages, namely information subsidies. (Turk, 1985; Kim & Kiousis, 2012; Kiousis & Ragasfn j, 2016) As Berkowitz & Adams (1990) note, “The importance of studying the role of information subsidies in the agenda-building process is that it helps assess the magnitude of news source power”
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