Does it make sense to measure media agenda on Internet Enviroments?

As I’ve said before, and based on the Dearing and Rogers’s (1996) literature about traditional agenda-setting research, scholars split the concepts of public agenda, media agenda and policy agenda, and study possible correlations between them.

What I ask is that if it makes sense to measure media agenda in traditional ways, such as counting the issues which appear on the frontpage of a newspaper or on a TV news, or instance. I ask that because I see a shift between the ways of seeing the media agenda, as evertyhing seems to be interconnected, including traditional media itself. It’s not that media agenda does not play the role of setting the public agenda, but in an era of media convergence and growth of information channels, it makes more sense to understand the networks that an issue may produce through its distribution and consumption through several types of media outlet. In other words, there seems to be a paradigm shift from media agenda-setting to content agenda-setting, reinforced by the ideas of selective exposure and need for orientation.

I believe the agenda-setting theory is just beginning, if one assumes that certain contents which are not distributed by traditional media outlets produce effects among its consumers. Actually, it’s always been like that, as McCombs itself claims that agenda-setting theory is a paradigm to be investigated through and among several types of agendas. However, within Internet environments is much easier to identify the directions of those influences. The results also can be very useful to marketing research, as social networks provide cues about what people are listening to, or reading or watching (1st level of agenda-setting), as well as their points of view about them (2nd level of agenda-setting).

Back to work again

Long time passed and many things have happened since the last time I wrote a post, and I´m sure a single post wouldn´t be enough to recover everything my research has been through during this academic year at Universidad de Navarra. I just want to say briefly that my corpus has changed significantly, and that I´ve been thinking that my research deals with the proposition of research designs to investigate agenda-setting on Internet environments

Talking to Orihuela, we´ve come to a conclusion that getting ten weblogs as a sample to investigate patterns of information consumption in Spain wouldn´t be enough to reflect patterns of information consumption in general, so that we´ve decided to study patterns of information consumption among users of Menéame, as it´s a system of news promotion where users promote and vote articles from different nature. I have already set up the variables to be collected and analysed. This change implied several consequences, which means that audiences can be studied in qualitative ways that wouldn´t be possible otherwise through traditional agenda-setting research designs.

Since September of 2007, I have written and presented three articles about research designs concerning agenda-setting research (first and second levels) in three different congresses, testing variables which could be analised to understand patterns of consumption among audiences. Fortunatley, in these events I had the opportunity to talk to several people who have confirmed my intuition that media companies have not developed means to understand more about their audiences, apart from marketing surveys, which are not very effective to understand certain aspects about the audience in depth. Picard´s post also confirms my intuition.

An interesting project to investigate agenda-setting theory

According to the Institute for Interactive Journalism, Tech. President is a “nonpartisan group blog that covers real-time, online activity of the 2008 presidential candidates – and chronicles online content from voters who will elect them”. It´s not a surprise, then, that is the $ 10,000 Grand Prize winner of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

I hope projects like the TechPresident.com happen in other countries soon. And I mean projects which deal no only with politics and politicians, but also with other issues, as I believe market and consumer researches are going to be thought much from what real people talk about and in more spontaneous conditions, like what we find in social softwares. Besides its several bennefits to citizens, politicians and journalists, I think Tech.President is quite interesting to investigate how issues and events spread through different channels of information as well as their frames about the issues. But I believe talking about methods of investigation is a subject for another post…

Via Gjol

What are weblogs´agenda like?

As I´ve mentioned in the first post, I found a very interesting thesis about agenda-setting research, which has become an e-book. Among other things, it compiles most of the characteristics which define the media agenda (issues or events chosen and spread by the media, through gatekeeping processes), the public agenda (composed by the issues or events which eco among the public or the audiences) and the policy agenda (formed by the events or issues which are brought by the policymakers). There´s also the interpersonal agenda, characterized by issues which are discussed by social groups, of which individuals take part.

Then, I ask: how could be defined and characterized the agenda of specialized weblogs? It seems that the issued or events that are spread by weblogs may include some of the characteristics of all agendas mentioned above. As having traits of media agenda because obviously is a medium, centered in practices of gatewatching. Besides that, the weblogs contemplate at some degree, a grade of specialization sbout the issues or events about what they talk, being able, thus, influence its audience/user, through elements which can encourage or discourage interest by issues or the page itself.

Weblogs embodies elements of public agenda and interpersonal agenda also, as they serve as a cyber environment of interest, reverberation of issues and events, and of conversation among ordinary people. Depending on who maintain it or on the group of weblogs which are the object of investigation, it can embodie elements of policymakers agenda, as it is the case of policymakers who maintain those chronological webpages.

It´s important these distinctions in a sense that new methodological approaches should be necessary to investigate how the issues and events spread on weblogs and what patterns of influence and references they have.

Does the user´s agenda really differ from the mainstream media´s agenda?

Yes. According to a research conducted by the Project for Excelence in Journalism, the issues spread by the called user driven news sources (Digg, o Del.icio.us and Reddit) are different and more diverse from the issues spread by the mainstream media. BBC has shortened what the research is all about.

Although I see the method employed with great restrictions, I believe it´s one of the first empirical studies which are concerned with agenda-setting and cyber environments. As it has been expected by the research, I don´t believe that all issues from traditional media should be contemplated by those social filters. If users highlight some issues and those differ from traditional media, there should be a comparison between these social filters and the specialized mainstream media.

Technology, which has been highlighted by the users according to the research, for instance, is an issue that is rarely highlighted by the mainstream media, except if it´s a specialized one. In other words, does it make more sense to compare issues related to technology and spread by user driven news sources with Wired magazine or the Washington Post? Another question is: Are those social softwares really representative to investigate similarities or differencies among issues? Why not to use Technorati instead?

I ask these questions because I believe the mass media´s agenda cannot be thought as having the same logics and processes of the agenda spread by user driven news sources, and, thus, cannot be compared using similar perspectives.

Tracking trails for research

While I don´t get the access entrance to UNAV´s library, my supervisor, José Luis Orihuela, told me to research websites which deal somehow with my research, or at least with my object of research, which are the weblogs.

I don´t mean to deal with issues related to weblogs and Journalism in general. There are plenty of websites that do it. The task seems to be a little more complex, as there are few places where to find debates surrounding agenda-setting processes or media-effects and cyberenvironment, and more specifically, the blogosphere. Most of these debates can be found in scientific magazines, located in online databases, and restricted to researchers from some universities, whic, somehow, deals with my research.

Orihuela has shown me some options to track the trail of my research. I have chosen to maintain a weblog about it. The portuguese version of this site is a little bigger, as talks about daily and travel experiences of the time I´ve been living here in Pamplona.

At the beginning of the doctorate, in the first semester of 2006, the Post Graduation Program of the Faculty of Communication in the university I´m attached to offered a very interesting subject whic dealt with media-effects, whose professor is Wilson Gomes. It has contributed significantly to define more accurately about what my research and my object of research were going to be, as well as to update the debate about methods of investigation and concepts related to media-effects. Besides that, as a professor of Theory of Communication and Theory of Journalism, the subject has helped me to understand more and more some of the concepts and methods discussed in class.

Due to my former academic and professional trajectory, it would be unavoidable not to propose a discussion which could join both conceptual and theoretical perspectives: the media-effects and the cyberenvironments, and more specifically, the blogosphere, subject of attention since the master, which ended in December of 2003.

As if reading so many articles, essays and books chapters about agenda-setting research was not enough, I have chosen to begin my Doctoral Stage abroad by reviewing once more the lireature about the agenda-setting paradigm.

I found yesterday a very interesting thesis, which has been published as a book and become digital, which is successful in compiling, in a very sistematized way, some of the main statements, concepts and empirical studies related to the agenda-setting research. Part of the classic literature has been read, but the other part is going to be revised only when I get the access to the overwhelming library of UNAV as well as to the articles of its online database.

Why to review the literature on agenda-setting? I believe my research questions have been well settled, but other questions may come up or be redesigned, and then, while I have the concepts and statements more defined in my mind, and I would be able to rearrange or readapt them more easily into the blogosphere.