Theory

The Daily Telegraph‘s Robert Colvile has picked up on my post about the key findings from my thesis into whether political bloggers can impact the MSM agenda. He gives his own perspective on the issues involved at the paper’s Three Line Whip blog.

Robert starts by pointing out that:

"The fact is that, from the outside, the mainstream media (or ‘MSM’, as
it is referred to in the blogosphere, often as a term of abuse) looks
quite monolithic. But inside, it’s made up of hundreds of editors and
writers and reporters, all casting around for things to fill their
pages with."

This is a very important point to bear in mind. We (bloggers and social media types) do tend to talk about the MSM as a monolithic institution  when in reality – while this is perhaps true at the organisational level –  like all vast organisms there are undoubtedly sub-layers and networks of real, human activity which are easily overlooked.

To this I would say of course MSM institutions are built up of networks in the same way the blogosphere is. The main difference is that the blogosphere is designed in a way that allows it to be open and facilitate the opportunities and benefits available to those within the network. I would argue that the reverse is generally true of institutional organisations. They tend to want to close down unchecked and living networks – whether consciously (at a personal level) or sub-consciously (the inherent bureaucracy present).

Robert also writes:

"The technology makes this process [news gathering] easier for online material, but as
far as I can see the basic approach is the same as usual. Trying to
theorise about it in terms of the formal influence of the blogosphere
on the mainstream media might be, as the great Boris said in another context, ‘like trying to pin jelly to a wall’."

Again he is raises another important point that my research hopefully makes clear, but which may well not have been made cyrstal clear in my previous post. The problem with trying to theorise formally is that most – if not all – formal media theories were created around traditional channels, whether TV, radio or print media. In fact there are plenty of journal articles that deal with online media but through the theoretical form and function of traditional media… I digress.

In my full conclusion I point to the fact that while there is some evidence to suggest agenda-setting by bloggers, the models used in the study are all fairly linear – ie. broadcast. I recommend that further study is necessary to examine the flow of information in a networked world, possibly through a revised Two-Step Flow theory which is built around the flow of information to and from the media and public via ‘opinion leaders’ – which in this case are be represented by bloggers.

Anyway. This is all fascinating stuff and hopefully I’ll get the chance to explore some of these ideas further.

Robert also has a book coming out shortly on the internet and politics.

Technorati tags: Daily Telegraph, research, politics, media theory

I submitted my PR Diploma dissertation at long last this week. It examined whether political bloggers in the UK have an influence on the media agenda of broadsheet newspapers.

I won’t go into the findings in depth as I plan to upload a pdf of the full thesis in due course.

But the findings were interesting and I’ve summarised the main points below.

• The study undertook a longitudinal evaluation of three case studies where it appeared UK political bloggers had influenced the broadsheet’s media agenda. These findings were then compared with data from interviews carried out with key journalists writing about the case studies issues in the MSM.

• The case studies were: the Charity Commission investigation into the Smith Institute; the Labour Party auctioning a copy of the Hutton Report signed by Cherie Blair and Iraqi translators’ asylum status.

• Results suggested that all three case studies displayed some evidence of media agenda-setting. All three cases appeared to act as trigger events (Dear and Rogers, 1996). That is online media events that occurred before the issues in question were picked up by the MSM – thus triggering media coverage.

• It also appeared that in all the case studies influential, high-traffic blogs – or networks of lower-traffic ones – acted as framing devices (Drezner and Farrell, 2004) around the story, pulling together key information and interpreting/analysing issues. This was reinforced by one journalists who admitted in an interview that he used blogs as sources of “comment” and “insight” for stories.

• Despite the above findings, 100% of the journalists interviewed claimed they did not use material from blogs when writing stories, while 50% of journalists said they did not even read blogs.

• Interestingly of the remaining 50% that did read blogs, one journalist indicated that he used blogs for insight into political parties’ grassroots members while another admitted “cross-fertilisation” between an influential blog and his stories.

• The general conclusion was that although on paper there appears – at least – theoretical evidence for media agenda-setting by UK political blogs results from the newsdesk indicate that for the majority, blogs are not a trusted source of news.

• The conclusion speculates this could be either the journalists interviewed are not being entirely open in their answers and that blogs play a bigger role in the newsgathering process or that there is agenda-setting going on but that this agenda-setting process in not linear, direct from blogs to the newsdesk. Instead it may flow indirect to the media agenda through either the policy agenda or public agenda or perhaps through an entirely unknown channel being opened up by the networked world of the internet.

• The thesis suggests further research – particularly from the critical perspective of Two-Step Flow  theory – is necessary to investigate these issues.

I’m hoping to tweak the thesis slightly and submit it as a conference paper in 2008, so if anyone has any feedback I’d love to hear it!

Technorati tags: PR, public relations, research, theory, agenda-setting, newspapers, blogging, politics