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Agenda Building in the Age of Online Audience Feedback a Thesis Agenda Building in the Age of Online Audience Feedback A thesis submitted to the College of Communication and Information of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Patrick R. Mayock May 2012 Thesis written by Patrick R. Mayock B.A., Ohio University, 2007 M.A., Kent State University, 2012 Approved by ______________________________________ Danielle Coombs, Ph.D., Co-Advisor ______________________________________ Robert Batchelor, Ph.D., Co-Advisor ______________________________________ Jeff Fruit, Director, School of Journalism and Mass Communication ______________________________________ Stanley T. Wearden, Ph.D., Dean, College of Communication and Information Table of Contents Page TABLE OF CONTENTS ...............................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..............................................................................................iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................1 II. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE.........................................................3 Agenda Setting...........................................................................................3 Agenda Setting Online ...............................................................................9 Audience Interaction ................................................................................11 III. RESEARCH QUESTIONS...........................................................................17 IV. METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................19 V. RESULTS......................................................................................................22 Most-Considered Feedback Channels.......................................................22 Audiences’ Impact on Existing Reportage Plans.......................................28 Audience Feedback and New Article Ideas...............................................31 VI. DISCUSSION...............................................................................................34 APPENDICES A. Questionnaire.................................................................................................43 B. Feedback Table ..............................................................................................44 REFERENCES..............................................................................................................45 iii Acknowledgments I’d like to thank my patient wife, Emily, who knew precisely when to offer encouragement, empathy or a swift kick in the butt as the weeks of research and revisions dragged into months. Thanks also to my loving parents who never waned in their support and enthusiasm. And finally, I must recognize an exceptionally accommodating team of advisors who gave me the length on my leash when I needed it and tugged me back in just in time to get me across the finish line. I couldn’t have done it without any of you. iv 1 Chapter I Introduction CNN’s decision to lay off approximately 50 employees in December 2011 might have come as a shock to some of the staffers working within the cable giant’s newsroom, but the move seemed hardly out of the ordinary within the context of the broader media industry marred by downsizing and budget cutbacks. More surprising, however, was the rationale delivered by Jack Womack, CNN’s senior vice president of domestic news operations. Within a written correspondence highlighting operational inefficiencies and staff redundancies one would expect in similar corporate memos, Womack also cited user-generated content and social media, as well as CNN iReporters as contributing factors. That the common citizen, armed with nothing more than jerky smartphone cameras and high-speed Internet access, could so starkly impact the landscape of a venerable legacy newsroom is yet another chapter in the rapidly expanding introduction to participatory journalism in the online age. Though the Web is now a mature news channel, participatory journalism remains a new phenomenon. And while researchers have examined the impact the media have on their audiences, few have focused on how audience interaction is shaping the press in return. This thesis adds to the scholarly literature by examining at least a part of that audience/press interaction: the consequences of online audience feedback on the agenda- building stage of the newsgathering process. My work in this new area borrows heavily from past agenda-setting research, which concludes rather definitively that the press not only tells the public what to think about a topic, but also how to think about it. 2 Furthermore, my research adds to the scholarly work on the related concept of agenda building, which examines how the media construct that agenda and what sources influence the process. My specific focus analyzes how emerging online audience feedback channels, such as article comments, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages, influence how journalists collect the news and form their agenda. The goal is to provide some clarity surrounding the role of user-generated content in the newsroom, leaving journalists and their editors in a better position to navigate this increasingly complex space. 3 Chapter II Review of Related Literature Agenda Setting Some 40 years before the term “agenda setting” was even introduced into the vernacular, Lippmann (1922) laid the groundwork for the theory in his groundbreaking book Public Opinion. In the seminal work, the American-born intellectual argued the real world was too big and complex for people to understand in its entirety. Common citizens, armed with insufficient time, energy, and capabilities, must rely on interpretation via “pictures” in their heads (p. 16). While man can construct those “simpler models” for himself, Cohen, in The Press and Foreign Policy (1963) claimed that the task is better left to the press. His work advanced Lippmann’s ideas and, as a result, is largely credited with formalizing the theory of agenda setting—even though its author did not specifically use the term. Cohen explained: The press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. (p. 13) First-level agenda setting. Having been refined into a legitimate theoretical framework—albeit one without a name or label—agenda setting faced the scrutiny of empirical research. McCombs and Shaw (1972) introduced the term in their groundbreaking study that investigated the role of media coverage in shaping the public’s attitudes and agendas during elections. During the September and October preceding the 1968 president election, McCombs and Shaw asked 100 undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—those 4 deemed the most open or susceptible to campaign information—to outline “the key issues as he (sic) saw them, regardless of what the candidates might be saying at the moment” (1972, p. 178). Concurrently, the authors analyzed select media outlets serving the city to search for correlations between political coverage of the campaigns and what the 100 interview subjects found most important. Their findings underscored Cohen’s earlier claims of the media’s stunning influence in shaping the pictures that dominated public consciousness: The media appear to have exerted a considerable impact on voters’ judgments of what they considered the major issues of the campaign. … In short, the data suggest a very strong relationship between the emphasis placed on different campaign issues by the media (reflecting to a considerable degree the emphasis by candidates) and the judgments of voters as to the salience and importance of various campaign topics. (p. 180-181) After observing high correlations between the media agenda and public agenda, McCombs and Shaw set out to establish time order, which was necessary for determining the causal influence of the media agenda. The duo designed a longitudinal study in Charlotte, North Carolina, during the following presidential campaign, which again found a correlation from the newspaper agenda to the later public agenda (McCombs, 1977). Shaw and McCombs (1977) expounded on the findings in The Emergence of American Political Issues, “which gave them enough space to develop agenda setting from a wildly successful hypothesis into a developing theory” (Davie & Maher, 2006). Subsequent studies from other researchers confirmed the findings. Iyengar and Behr (1985), for example, found that the public agenda of television viewers over a seven-year span correlated closely to that of the media agenda. A 33-week study from Salwen (1986) that analyzed the influence of three Michigan newspapers on the public agenda found that the press’s ongoing coverage of an issue transmitted a message of legitimacy to the 5 public. Iyengar and Kinder (1987) followed up on Iyengar’s earlier studies of television influence by testing whether issues that receive prominent attention on national news become what the viewing public considers the nation’s most important problems. Their findings corroborated the hypothesis: “Americans’ view of their society and nation are powerfully shaped by the stories that appear on the evening news” (p. 112). Second-level agenda setting. The next wave of agenda-setting research kicked off with the so-called “three- site study,”
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