Gone are the days of sharing the newspaper sections over cereal and the family gathering each evening around the TV for the nightly news broadcast. The media landscape has evolved from there to round-the-clock cable news stations to even better: an online world where news and analysis are available at the point of a mouse, read of a personal RSS lineup, or scan of shared information forwarded electronically by friends, family, and acquaintances.
This change has significant implications for traditional media theory, particularly agenda setting. The agenda-setting theory suggests that the news media has a major influence on audiences by the choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and, therefore, what local, national, and international issues to consider critically important, based on how much prominence and space given to the stories.
In a 2002, Althaus and Tewksbury used the agenda-setting theory for the framework of an experiment to examine whether readers of the paper and online versions of The New York Times developed different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Analysis of the results determined that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers. Paper readers were exposed to a broader range of public affairs coverage than online readers and tended to be more concerned about international issues.
Print readers use clues from article location, size of headline and visuals, story length, and repetition to guide their decisions about what issues are important. A reader’s interest in a topic can, however, override a prominence criterion.
But online, those clues exist in an entirely different schema. Readers don’t sit down to digest their news holding a broadsheet with static words and pictures. Instead of digesting the news that is delivered to them, readers seek out their information in a highly selective way, with instant and easy access to hundreds of professional news sites and thousands (millions?) of topical blogs. Readers develop their own personal criteria that guide their decisions about what issues are important. Why? Different newspapers and television newscasts are set up in similar ways, and the media as a whole has trained readers and viewers how to translate the agenda setting clues. But different pieces of new media are set up in different, unfamiliar ways and, at the core, are bucking the ideas of agenda setting and conformity. However, new media does offer some clues that set an agenda, such as how grazers who click from page to page to page might see the same big news story on every news page and on many blogs.
This alteration in theory extends to a greater degree in the prairie of blogs and RSS, where “grazers” and “media snackers” set their own topical agendas by the subjects they choose to read and the writers whose opinion they choose to read.
In the traditional, static media, readers are more likely to be exposed, even briefly, to stories they might not have actively sought otherwise. But online, because of the organization of news sites and the reader-driven selection process, readers are less likely to be exposed to a broad range of information, and less likely to be affected by agenda setting.
As the digital age gets older, and more and more people turn online for their news and context and therefore are less influenced by the traditional media effect of agenda setting, we must contemplate these implications. Not only may readers who use this method of selective exposure be poorly informed and develop narrow views on public affairs, but the broad context for conversation and understanding among the general public is lost. Individual agendas will become more important, and we will need to develop new ways to draw lines between those agendas.
We understand this theory about how the public agenda is set in the traditional media and its benefits. More research is needed into how – and if – the public agenda is set in the digital age, and what this new form of disseminating and digesting news means.
*Althaus, S.L. and Tewksbury (2002). “Agenda setting and the “new” news.” Communication Research, 29(2), pp. 180-207.
