Week 4 Flashcards
Agenda-building
How the media-agenda is shaped
Agenda-building power
the influence of organizations and individuals on the media agenda
Information subsidies
content that they believe is interesting to the media –> press releases or conferences
Editorial subsidies
- much richer in content than information subsidies
- are not only from the perspective of the organization, they also take in the effort to include quotes by other actors –> ready-to-publish packages
Why do organizations all these efforts to influence the media agenda?
A company’s message presented through the media is more credible than direct corporate communication
Goal professional
acceptance of the frame by stakeholders and journalists
What is PR for a process?
a discursive (based on the conscious use of reasoning rather than on intuition) process in which professionals and journalists construct and negotiate frames about an event or issue related to the company
Aim of Cornelissen et al.?
advice professional on effective communication with journalists as key stakeholders
Technician PR role
PR-professional that is narrowly focusing on the dissemination of information rather than engaging in a sincere/prolific dialogue with the media and other stakeholders
Risks of technical approach
- insufficient reflection upon own framing of the issue and the likelihood of the news media accepting his frame
- a too narrow view of relevant stakeholders
–> consequently, representation of event is not accepted by the stakeholders
Manager PR role
- not just distributing information, representing the organization in a more broader view
- look beyond the press release towards the relationship with the journalist
Tasks manager
- counseling manager of entire organization
- developing CSR programs
- Boundary-spanner with environment: guard all fences –> be aware of everything that the organization is in interaction with
Four metaphors journalism & PR
- tango
- game
- war
- waterfall
Tango
- a dance
- You both need each other, it’s a mutual interdependency
- But one takes the lead
- its more often the PR professional than the journalist takes the lead
Game
- they’re both involved in a game
- there’s professional interaction/there are clear rules
- we should play with fair sportsmen like behavior; mutual respect
War
- they’re engaged in a war
- a journalist and PR professional are each other’s opponents and view each other with little trust and mutual criticism about each other’s roles and there’s hardly any cooperation
Waterfall
- All these information subsidies that are flooding the indues of the journalist
Earned media takes the backseat to owned media
Companies using their own websites, internet search engines and social media to build their brand identities and communicate directly with stakeholders
What means the quote of Jackson & Maloney
- you don’t really need traditional media as in the old days
- traditional media are also becoming less important to the public
- more Americans get news often from social media than print newspapers
- however, it can be a bit tricky if the information provided by the organization is unfiltered. there’s no fact-checker. So with digital media, it’s harder to separate fact from truth
Findings Jackson & Maloney
- Organizations produce their own content is increasingly produced and try to push it to news media
- PR provides editorial subsidies: ready to print packages
- Journalists still act as gatekeepers: they select and interpret organization’s information subsidies
- PR practitioners are professionally or personally concerned about increasing churnalism: PR needs trust between journalists and readers
Churnalism: as a result of profit maximization and increasing time pressure for journalists, we see that…
- less journalists produce more output in less time
- leading to an increased use of subsidized content from sources or news agencies
- news agencies strongly rely on source content as well
- result: sources (organizations) are increasingly able to build and shape the media agenda
Lewis about churnalism
Even to the extent that there’s a clear linear process in which PR material is reproduced by agency journalists whose copy is, in turn, reproduced in the news media
News agencies
- wholesalers of news = crucial gatekeepers and agenda setters
- for online newsrooms, reliance is even stronger
- agency news strongly relies on credible and thus elite sources
- concerns about diversity
- agency is ideal intermediary for sources
- aditional problem: lack of attribution and transparency
- many agencies struggle to survive in current digital age: lost monopoly on news
Two measures Boumans
- agenda building ratio
- churnalism index
Agenda building ratio
= share of news about organizations initiated by a press release, in proportion to total amount of news related to that source
Churnalism index
0 (both texts are unique: journalistic article is totally different from the press release) to 1 (literal copy)
Churnalism findings in sum
- media
- content of agency more often based on press releases than newspapers
- but: the agency doesn’t edit less newspapers. they don’t copy-paste directly, they add journalistic content to it
- content of free newspapers most similar to subsidizes content - organizations
- NGO’s score better on both measures - time
- no trends of increased reliance on press releases or agency copy
