Simon Collister (via Three Line Whip)has sumbitted a PR Diploma Dissertation examining whether political bloggers in the UK have an influence on the media agenda of broadsheet newspapers.
He is to publish the full paper shortly but writes of his conclusions:
Using case studies of 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.
His results suggested that
all three case studies displayed some evidence of media agenda-setting. All three cases appeared to act as trigger eventsand that
all the case studies influential, high-traffic blogs – or networks of lower-traffic ones – acted as framing devices around the story, pulling together key information and interpreting/analysing issues.
Suprsingly though his research showed that
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.
And on this issue he speculates that
" 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
2 comments:
Hi Nigel. I ought to add that the study was relatively small scale - although hopefully more research will be undertaken.
I suppose by "bigger role" I specifically meant blog influence a wider agenda (public) and thus support media agenda-setting indirectly - so information flow from other sources onto the media agenda.
Still, a very interesting study Simon and I look forward to reading the full report.I am still baffled by the responses that you had to journalists not reading blogs.
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