Intermedia Agenda Setting in the Social Media Age: How Traditional Players Dominate the News Agenda in Election Times

Abstract

Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a “news story” approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a “traditional” analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. “Slow” newspapers, for example, often precede other media’s coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.

Who is Influencing the #GDPR Discussion on Twitter: Implications for Public Relations

“…Moreover, universities use Twitter to share their news with the general audience [44]. Mainstream media: Social media complement mainstream media by offering new channels to access the latest news and share them with one's friends and followers in real-time [33]. Realizing the effectiveness and efficiency of social media in news sharing, mainstream media agencies have turned to these platforms to broadcast their own news and connect with their readers.…”

Understanding the dynamics of politicians' visibility in traditional and social media

“…The reasons why one medium may be influenced by other media include the following: a report by another medium may serve as an information short-cut for the salience and newsworthiness of an issue (e.g., Dearing and Rogers 1996;Harder, Sevenans, and Van Aelst 2017;Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2008); and given intense competition and scarce resources, following other media ensures that a particular medium can keep up with its competitors in securing the audience's attention (Mathes and Pfetsch 1991;Harder, Sevenans, and Van Aelst 2017).…”

“…Yet, research examining the dynamic, that is the causal relationship between traditional news visibility of individual political actors and their visibility on social media, is limited. Existing research has so far often focused on investigating intermedia dynamics between traditional and social media with respect to issue dominance and presentation (Meraz 2011;Neuman et al 2014;Sung and Hwang 2014;Conway, Kenski, and Wang 2015;Vargo, Basilaia, and Shaw 2015), the development of debates (e.g., Ceron, Curini, and Iacus 2016), and news stories (Harder, Sevenans, and Van Aelst 2017).…”

Who sets the cyber agenda? Intermedia agenda-setting online: the case of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations

“…These changes have additional impact due to the growth of the online journalists' community and their extensive use of SNS [12]. Intermedia agenda-setting solely among online media outlets has only scarcely been measured or analyzed (for notable exceptions, see for example [16,17]). We thus look at online outlets only and ask, who is setting media agendas in the online environment, and how?…”

“…The theory, formulated when traditional media entities owned the tools of item selection, content formation and content distribution, requires more integrative perspectives on traditional media outlets within today's open and interactive media age [7,17,43,44].…”