1、project report for Social Research and the Internet“ - Bloggers with an Agenda - Developing a Methodology to Assess whether Bloggers Rate Topics Independent from Media Tobias Escher (tobias.escheroii.ox.ac.uk) Oxford Internet Institute, Hilary 2007 Abstract This paper uses the theory of agenda setti
2、ng to examine the relationship between blogs on the one hand and the media on the other. As previous research suggests that political topics on the blogosphere are mostly originating from the mainstream media the aim of this paper is to focus on the salience of issues on the respective agenda and to
3、 compare the importance of stories on the mainstream media with the importance of the same stories on the blogosphere. Specifically this research is interested in whether bloggers use relevance criteria that are different from the media or whether they adopt the issue salience assigned by media. A n
4、ew methodology is proposed and piloted that applies different methods of web metrics to obtain empirical data that can help to answer the research question. Data is collected from Google News and posts in the blogosphere about the same topic are identified via Yahoo Term Extraction and Google Blogse
5、arch. The rank of a story on the media agenda (according to number of articles for a story) is then compared with the rank of this story on the blogosphere agenda (according to number of posts for the same story). The results from the pilot study indicate that the proposed methodology can indeed be
6、useful to analyze differences between media and blogging agenda. There are a number of methodological problems that are addressed. The general trend emerging from the data is that while both agendas are to some degree in tune, bloggers do not simply mirror the media agenda but apply different criter
7、ia to judge issue salience. The continuously updated collection of data is made available via a web interface at http:/uggeshall.adastral.ucl.ac.uk/blogagenda/index.html1Table of Contents Introduction. 2 Previous Research.3 Hypothesis. 5 Method 6 Findings from Pilot . 12 Conclusion 16 Literature. 17
8、 Appendix. 18 Introduction There is much debate on the influence that the blogosphere or user-generated content in general has on traditional journalism and the mainstream media. Evidence suggests a growing importance of user-generated content with various established media outlets trying to integra
9、te blogs and forms of citizen journalism into their portfolio (see BBC “email your picture” or Guardians “Comment is Free”). This debate must be seen in a wider context of traditional media critique that is questioning the role and power of mass media to define which topics are relevant (and more im
10、portantly, which ones are not) and to influence public opinion. Some have argued that blogs will be able to offer a counter to traditional media power by giving formerly passive audiences the technology to become producers of news themselves and to raise their topics to the awareness of a potentiall
11、y huge audience on the Internet (Gorgura 2004). Some of these hopes seemed to be justified by a number of occasions where indeed stories that have not (or not sufficiently) been picked up by traditional media emerged on blogs and eventually gained so much momentum in the blogosphere that subsequentl
12、y they had to be taken up by mainstream media. Examples include the case of US Senator Trent Lott who had to resign after remarks he made at a party (2004; Gill 2004), the debate about president Bushs military credentials (Adamic and Glance 2005) or Salman Pax, the blogger from Baghdad. In this way
13、blogs did indeed overturn the traditional way of mass communication and empower the audiences. At the same time, the vast amount of content on blogs is either completely personal (Herring, Scheidt et al. 2004) or heavily citing traditional media 2(Schmidt, Paetzolt et al. 2006). So the question pers
14、ists how alternative the blogosphere really is and subsequently what can be its impact? In this paper I treat blogs as an entity of its own, separate from the established mass media but also distinct from the general public as such the audience of the news. Strictly speaking blogs are much more of a
15、 hybrid: They remove the distinction of active news producers and passive audience (Delwiche 2005) as part of the mass media audience forms the blogosphere. At the same time there is also an increasing incorporation of blogging into established media. Still as Halavais (Halavais 2002) points out, it
16、 has become fashionable to think of the millions of disparate blogs as an entity, the blogosphere and it has been shown that measured in structural terms, blogs do indeed increasingly resemble an interconnected space of its own (Kumar, Novak et al. 2003). I treat the blogosphere as a distinctive spa
17、ce that interacts with the media on the one hand and with the public on the other - a relationship that I outlined below. blogosphere mass media public Figure 1: Simplified Model of Interaction between Media, Blogs and Public In this paper, I will not look onto the public opinion side of effects but
18、 focus exclusively on the relationship of the blogosphere with the traditional mass media. This small scale research project is aimed at providing empirical data to help assess the relationship between blogs and established mass media. It will analyse the topics that are discussed in the mainstream
19、media on the one hand and the blogosphere on the other hand by applying the theory of agenda setting and using methods of web metrics. By comparing the agenda of established media with the agenda of blogs I will try to analyse whether bloggers do attribute certain issues the same importance as the m
20、edia does or whether they apply different criteria to judge their importance. Previous Research The theory of agenda setting originates from an older research that in the age of emerging mass media was enquiring about the effects of those media on the public, starting with Lippmann (Lippmann 1922).
21、While the progressing research quickly moved away from the assumption of major media effects, the agenda setting approach of McCombs and Shaw (McCombs and Shaw 1972) came back to attributing the mass media rather 3significant effects. However, this time effects were not defined as a change in affect
22、ion (how people feel and think about a subject), but in cognition (what people know about a subject). Or, in the words of Cohen (Cohen 1963: 13), mass media “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 a
23、bout.“ The main idea of McCombs and Shaw was that the media by reporting about a subject would put this on the agenda, this is in peoples minds. By various means (e.g. according to number of times of coverage, placement, length etc.) they will also attribute these issues a certain importance. So as
24、agenda they basically understood a set of issues with a certain rank order of importance or in the words of McCombs and Shaw: with a certain salience. The traditional agenda setting research usually follows a pattern outlined in Figure 2. media agenda public agenda content analysis: public survey: s
25、tories most often reported by media what is the most important issue these days? 1. president bush 1. war in iraq 2. climate change 2. climate change 3. war in iraq 3. jobscompare Is there an overlap? Do topics have the same salience? Figure 2: Methodology of Traditional Agenda Setting Research McCo
26、mbs and Shaw found a huge correlation of media and public agenda (almost 1.0 which in itself raises the question whether the method is actually valid). The question that all agenda setting researchers face then is one of causality: who is influencing whom? The question is of importance because as De
27、aring and Rogers (1996) point out that due to a limited attention span of the individual, agenda setting is usually a zero-sum game: new issues displace old ones. Who determines what issues feature high on the agenda has the power to shape public discourse (if not opinion). While the research that f
28、ollowed McCombs and Shaw found a variety of intervening variables (Erbring, Goldenberg et al. 1980; Rogers 1993), the overall conclusion of agenda setting research has been that there are effects from the media onto the agenda of their audience. 4How does online communication and the tools that enab
29、le any individual to reach a global public with marginal cost change the rules of the game? Early studies of agenda setting and online communication have found clear evidence of an ongoing impact of traditional media (Roberts, Wanta et al. 2002). In recent years there have been a number of studies t
30、hat explore how blogs fit into the theory of agenda setting, sparked by the previously documented examples of blog topics that crossed over in the mainstream media. Despite these examples so far researchers have usually come to the conclusion that instances of blogs setting the agenda of media are t
31、he exception rather than the rule. As Halavais points out, the major stories in blogs are usually related to the reporting in the media. Similarly Murley and Roberts (2006) in their content analysis of the top 20 US blogs (according to traffic) found heavy citing of traditional media (about 50%, the
32、 majority of those posts would not even comment on the cited source). Murley and Roberts found very little original reporting (6% of all posts) and therefore locate the role of blogs as interpreting and commenting on mainstream media rather than coming up with new topics. While Drezner and Farell (2
33、004) have noted that due to the speed of publication blogs can have a first mover advantage, they see the primary impact of blogs through media professionals reading them. Hypothesis As previous research overwhelmingly suggests that the media largely determines what topics are discussed on blogs thi
34、s small scale project cannot search for evidence of the opposite. However, agenda setting is not only concerned with the kind of topics discussed but also with their salience. In other words, how important is an issue compared to others. The purpose of this study will be to establish the salience of
35、 issues on the media agenda as compared to the salience of those same issues on the blogosphere agenda. The question will therefore be: Do bloggers assign salience to issues differently than traditional media outlets? In this area there has been done little research. Thelwall and Hellstens compariso
36、n of online discussions with media reports on the London bombings (Thelwall and Hellsten 2006) found some key differences between the two spheres. Similarly Delwiche (2003) carried out a study of about 800 blog posts that quoted news sources and points out that bloggers seemed to be relatively indep
37、endent one might even say uninterested from the issues discussed in the media. To put this question into the wider context of the initially outlined interaction between the media, blogs and the public: Should bloggers rate the importance of issues differently 5from the media, then the blogosphere co
38、uld indeed offer an alternative way of judging the news of the world for the wider public. In the words of Gorgura, blogs could “forge an online sphere of dissensus” (Gorgura 2004). However, it is still debatable whether blogs even when offering alternative or dissenting viewpoints can have an impac
39、t onto wider public debate or whether they rather facilitate Sunsteins echo chamber (Sunstein 2001) by actually providing selected audiences with what they want to hear, not a broad spectrum of different opinions (Thompson 2003). Method Despite the number of studies that analyze blogs in relation to
40、 agenda setting none of them is convincing in methodological terms. Halavais (2002) simply uses word counts in blogs and does not conduct a proper comparison of blogs to the news agenda because the former seems to be just a mirror of the media. Delwiche (2005) has problems in operationalizing both t
41、he media agenda (simply using an Associated Press editor poll that asked “What was the most important story?”) and the public agenda (Gallup poll relying on a closed set of questions). Murley et al. (2006) would not compare the development of the stories over time but only look at a snapshot. Drezne
42、r et al. (2005) do an interesting study as they use a qualitative approach to measure the impact of blogs on the media (interviews with media professionals) but their conclusions rely on interpretation and assumptions and not on quantitative data. This paper aims to contribute a new methodology to c
43、ollect empirical data for the question under consideration. The methods that will be used mostly fall in the domain of web metrics that is usually concerned with counting entities or relations between entities on the web. While the application of web metric methods is prevalent in Computer Science (
44、albeit under different names), there are examples of their useful application for research questions in the Social Sciences (Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis et al. 2003; Thelwall and Hellsten 2006). Given the topic of research, the key methodological questions to answer are: What is going to be the sample
45、 of media outlets and blogs? How can we establish the agenda (this includes salience of issues) of the media and of the blogosphere? How do we compare the two agendas? What is the timeframe (e.g. snapshot vs. longitudinal study)? 6All of these questions are interconnected and have to be answered in
46、relation to each other. For example, the methods and tools of data collection one chooses can largely determine the nature of the sample. One of the key imperatives was to develop an automated approach. There are a variety of reasons for this that include easier data collection, the potential to use
47、 a much bigger sample and increased reliability as selection is based on certain criteria instead of subjective decisions by the researcher/coder. However, despite the named benefits there is a rather large initial effort required in order to set up the technology. What is more, the reliance on main
48、ly technological means for collecting and analyzing the data has pitfalls which will be outlined later. Sample Selection The basic decision to take is which languages (and therefore countries) to include and whether or not to focus on specific topics. For methodological reasons (see below) I decided
49、 to focus on the global agenda of English speaking news on the world in topics we might term “serious”. The topics are selected from the Google News “World” category1which excludes sports, entertainment and news that are only relevant to the US. Such a wide sample brings up immediately the issue of how homogenous the media (or blogosphere) agenda is worldwide. It would be desirable to conduct a comparison on state level and even on this level, “the explosion of media inputs erodes the notion of a unified media agenda” as Chaffee London, Sage. Delwiche, A. (2005). “Agenda
