Archives for May 2013

[April 13, 2010]

A recent study shows that ideology is a better predictor of beliefs about climate change than is educational attainment, and that the resulting “belief gaps” between liberals and conservatives grow over time.

This study marks a departure from previous work which showed that heavy media coverage of science news contributed to “knowledge gaps,” or growing disparities in knowledge between those with different levels of educational attainment.

The concern raised in the 1970s by the Minnesota team of Phil Tichenor, George Donohue and Clarice Olien was that widening “knowledge gaps” would impede institutional responses to social problems.

The present study by Doug Blanks Hindman of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University is different from the previous knowledge gap studies in a couple of important ways.

First, Hindman suggests that knowledge is replaced by beliefs when social problems enter the political fray. Second, he notes that whereas knowledge, and the resulting gaps, are predicted by educational level, beliefs are easily predicted by ideology. Hence, the “knowledge gaps” of a previous era become the “belief gaps” in an era of political polarization.

Data for the study were from five probability-based telephone surveys comprised of nationally representative samples sponsored by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and conducted by Princeton Survey Research International from June, 2006, to June 2008.

Hindman’s study showed that ideology was a stronger predictor than was educational attainment of the belief that there was solid evidence that the earth has been getting warmer.

The hypothesis of a strengthening relationship between ideology and beliefs over time—the belief gap—was weakly supported in the case of beliefs about whether or not there is solid evidence that the earth was getting warmer. Thus, under conditions of heavy media coverage, beliefs about the existence of global warming became more ideologically entrenched so that gaps between conservatives and liberals widened.

Hindman concludes that in an era of unprecedented partisanship, mass media coverage of politically contested issues contributes to widening belief gaps between ideological camps, further raising concerns about system adjustment to change.

Contact: Doug Blanks Hindman, Associate Professor, Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University. 509-335-6149. dhindman@wsu.edu.

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[June 16, 2010]

Joining in online newspapers’ message forums increases participants’ perception that they understand their local communities better, according to a new research study in the Spring 2010 edition of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. However, that participation and accompanying sense of community understanding is not related to their getting out and taking part in real-world community activities.

These findings are based on a survey of 538 participants in message forums at the online sites associated with 80 U.S. newspapers. Such forums generally consist of a portion of the website where visitors can post comments organized into common message “threads,” and can be found at about a third of all U.S. online newspapers.

One of the goals newspapers frequently have in hosting such forums is to build a virtual community that overlaps the geographic one. The study titled “Virtual Community Support for Offline Communities Through Online Newspaper Message Forums” done by Jack Rosenberry, a researcher at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., found that this overlap does develop. Forum users tended to be longtime community residents, with 57 percent of them living in community served by the newspaper for more than 20 years. About a third of forum participants said they know one or more of their online correspondents personally offline as well, and a quarter said they have become friends offline with someone they first met online.

Participation in the forums gives users a perception that they relate better to their communities. More than three quarters of respondents agreed with a statement that taking part in forums leads to better understanding of community issues while about 60 percent said the forums offered useful ideas for solving community problems. About half also said that their thinking about community issues had sometimes been changed by information from the forum. A further statistical analysis indicated that greater participation in the forums led to stronger agreement with each of these ideas.

However, forum participation was not related to actual community involvement or social-capital-building activities that might extend from this greater understanding. This was the case even though more than half of survey respondents reported that they had contacted someone offline about a community issue in response to online discussion about it, or had attended a meeting or event based on information from a forum discussion.

Taken at face value, these numbers seem to imply a mobilizing influence on the part of the forums. But statistical analysis showed that other variables were better predictors of this behavior, especially whether or not respondents’ offline relationships overlap their online ones. This means such “civic engagement” behavior is related more closely to existing social relationships and community involvement than it is to association with the online community. As it was colorfully described by another set of researchers who investigated virtual communities, “there is little reason to presume that the Internet will make social butterflies out of homebodies.” Participation in newspaper forums apparently does not, either.

Contact: Jack Rosenberry, Associate Professor, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, N.Y. 585-385-8206; jrosenberry@sjfc.edu.

<<RYCU

[June 22, 2010]

A new research study published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly examines general and robust constructs of news media brand personality that are applicable across multiple news media outlets, including broadcast and cable news networks, national and local newspaper, and news magazines.

Through a series of rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis procedures with the final set of 48 personality traits, the authors show that that news media brand personality is composed of five dimensions: Trustworthiness, Dynamism, Sincerity, Sophistication, and Toughness.

One of the significant contributions of this study is to provide news media companies a reliable and valid method to assess their brand personality.

As for the Trustworthiness dimension, for example, the Wall Street Journal was perceived to be the most trustworthy news media brand. It appears that the Wall Street Journal is known as a business newspaper, and uses fewer photographs and graphics than most other newspapers. Respondents may associate the subject and predominance of text with personality attributes such as “smart” and “serious” included in the trustworthy factor.

From a practical standpoint, the news media brand personality dimensions proposed by the authors can be helpful for media companies. In particular, news media companies can understand and monitor their news media brand personality structure to see if it matches the brand identity that they are developing in the crowded media marketplace.

They can also take advantage of the proposed news media brand personality constructs for diagnosing and improving their strategies to attract audiences and advertisers. The study therefore will help media companies fine-tune their image to survive the competition by better serving media audiences.

Baek, T. H., Kim, J., & Martin, H. J. (2010). Dimensions of News Media Brand Personality. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 87(1), 119-136.

CONTACT: Tae Hyun Baek, Doctoral Candidate, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, taehyun@uga.edu; or Jooyoung Kim, Assistant Professor, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, jykim@uga.edu.

<<RYCU

[July 20, 2010]

As U.S. newspaper publishers increasingly talk of building paywalls around their online content to ward off free-riders cannibalizing their print product, new research suggests that such efforts may backfire because most local users of local newspaper sites already are paying customers—by paying for the print edition.

A study published in the latest issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly found that two-thirds of visitors to local newspaper websites are “hybrid” readers—that is, they regularly read the print edition (and most of them pay for it) as well as the online version—in contrast to the remaining one-third of “online-only” readers.

Across a range of measures, hybrid readers were found to be more active on the local newspaper site (i.e., using it to search for a variety of news and classified ads information) and also more satisfied with the site’s offerings. These findings run counter to conventional wisdom that most online readers are avoiding the paid print newspaper because they can get the same information online for free, said the team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, led by Dr. Iris Chyi, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism.

“Thus, an online subscription or micropayment model would entail asking many local users to pay twice—or, if print subscribers are granted free access, it would mean publishers are chasing a minority of online-only users in the local market,” the authors concluded. “Moreover, these online-only local users are less active and are not more satisfied with the local newspaper site, making a pay model all the more challenging. In essence, in their pursuit of monetizing online content, publishers may very well end up alienating local users (hybrid as well as online-only).” Long-distance users, on the other hand, constitute a different market segment, which is examined in a different study as part of the overall research project (to be published in the International Journal on Media Management).

These findings were based on an analysis of data originally gathered by a newspaper research firm that conducted online reader surveys on 28 local newspaper websites around the United States from October 2007 to June 2008. Responses from 18,484 survey respondents were analyzed in the study.

Chyi and her co-authors—Mengchieh Jacie Yang, Seth Lewis, and Nan Zheng (see http://www.newmediaresearch.org/merg/)—have conducted a number of studies using the media economics perspective to challenge misperceptions regarding the economic nature of online news. Chyi’s research can be found at http://www.newmediaresearch.org.

CONTACT: Dr. H. Iris Chyi, assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin; chyi@mail.utexas.edu; http://www.newmediaresearch.org/

<<RYCU

[March 16, 2011]