Communications of the ACM
Research Confirms: Tech Blogs Set the Agenda For Traditional Media
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Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a guest lecturer at the University of Haifa, conducted research to determine if traditional media or technology blogs have the upper hand in "innovation journalism." She collected English-language tech coverage over an entire year, using 347 keywords to retrieve relevant stories from 50 leading websites which were divided into seven groups: 1.) newspapers sites, 2.) television sites, 3.) magazines sites, 4.) websites of traditional media as a whole, 5.) elite newsroom blogs, 6.) independent bloggers, and 7.) tech blogs as a whole. The research used the Sysomos MAP media analysis platform from Sysomos, and approximately 2,500 queries led to 1.5 million records.
The main findings of the research are that tech coverage in the blogs caused the tech coverage in traditional media. The results of the reversed analysis were not statistically significant, i.e., tech coverage in traditional media did not explain coverage in blogs. In conclusion, the research found that tech bloggers' activity preceded and is a strong predictor of the coverage by traditional tech journalists and not vice versa.
In addition, the researcher built matrices from tech keywords that co-occur in the same headline, thus, there is association between them. The network analysis illustrated how bundles of issues can be transferred from one communication channel to another: the way in which the tech bloggers associated different tech keywords was found significantly similar to that found in the traditional media.
Interviews with leading tech bloggers revealed factors that explain why blogs are the professional platform for tech initiatives: the intense publishing; the ability to make use of specific expertise and dig deeper than conventional media; opinionated and personal writing style; and focusing on early stage technology startups. Another explanation suggested that traditional media use attribution — e.g., "according to tech blog" — to avoid risking their reputation if a story does not develop as expected or is a rumor. Bloggers are not afraid to publish rumors, as long as they are disclosed as rumors.
The research also included an examination of the public's interest in tech topics. The main pattern from Google Trends found that searches in the Internet & Telecom category and the Computers & Electronics category peaked due to increased coverage and that these peaks become even more evident in the News section category. Part of the media's role is to present innovations in a more accessible way to the general public. The research found that web users searched for additional information after catching the buzz from tech news stories. The majority of readers do not have vast technical knowledge, so they turn to experts for insight.
A condition of winners-take-all was found as a few topics achieved the majority of the coverage and all others got a considerably lower coverage. The research originated tables of the Top 50 in each examined category. Here are the Top 6 from 2012:
- Leading tech companies: Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter
- Leading tech products: Android, iPhone, iPad, iOS, Mac, Windows
- Top tech topics: Apps, Smartphones, Tablets, Software, Gadgets, Social Media
- Leading tech events: CES, MWC, E3, SXSW, TechCrunch Disrupt, D10 (AllThingsD)
- Top tech leaders: Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt.
The leading companies, products, and executives identified in this research are still relevant today and are expected to stay dominant.
The tech coverage mainly dealt with software/hardware products being launched. However, other potentially important tech topics such as censorship, privacy issues, or negative stories of failures as well as layoffs were not noticeable in the researchers' timelines. A possible explanation is that big tech companies spend billions of dollars on marketing campaigns.
"The research revealed that the tech bloggers filter the tech issues and their interrelationships and set the traditional media agenda, which in turn transfers these topics to the general public," Weiss-Blatt says. "Consequently, we can consider tech bloggers as early recognizers or opinion leaders of technological innovations. Tech companies and their PR firms, when looking how to best promote their tech agenda, may benefit from the main conclusion of this research. The tech bloggers were found to be the trendsetters of the tech coverage and thus, they are recommended as an efficient channel for the flow of innovative information in the tech field."
The research was supervised by Professor Sheizaf Rafaeli from the Center for Internet Research and the Graduate School of Management and Professor Gabriel Weimann from the Department of Communication, at the University of Haifa, Israel. Some of the findings are published in a new book, "The Power of Information Networks: New Directions for Agenda Setting" (Taylor & Francis Group), edited by Professor Emeritus Maxwell McCombs from the University of Texas at Austin and Lei Guo from Boston University.
Additional infographics summarizing the research are available on Pinterest.
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