I have briefly stated before how PR is not advertising, but those in PR strategically use different forms of advertising to leverage the success of their goal. Cutting the crust off the whole debate of how influential media is to producing sales, you can check the case studies of Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw who developed the theory of Agenda-Setting in their Chapel Hill Study (1968).

In essence, they discovered that media influence was a temporary result which would die down in the minds of the viewers within hours after being exposed to the particular piece of media persuasion, depending on the medium used. (How often do you get told during an advertisement to “Act Now!“)

When you find yourself complaining about a particular ad that is put on repeat (remember the tv commercial that played itself again right after the first one, or the radio ad which plays right after one song and before the next?) you are seeing the abused type of agenda setting.

Before McCombs and Shaw, a particular Bernard Cohen had begun building the theory by observing and stating that the press “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 about.”*

Next up were Rogers and Dearing (1996), who had tried to better explain the Agenda-Setting Theory by providing more key concepts and definitions in Agenda Setting: Communication Concepts.

For an understanding of the gist of Agenda Setting, here is a positive example of how you could use Agenda Setting for the grand opening of a Coffee Shop.

You are the Public Relations Specialist for the largest Coffee House in Seattle (largest, meaning square feet, not number of Coffee Houses) which will be having its grand opening in two months. Honestly speaking, you better have your news release and press kit developed already.

Now, the announcement has gone out and not only is the media interested, but so are a few local Coffee Shops. You then begin to accept and arrange media requests for interviews, pre-opening tours, and exclusive photo shoots.

Now that you have set the agenda for the media, you direct more of your efforts toward the public by sending personal invitations to all the Coffee Shops in the surrounding area. In addition, you apply direct messaging to the demographic of people who purchase coffee on a daily basis. By notifying these people of your event, you have set the agenda for the public.

The media and the public are all over the day of your grand opening and you obtain extraordinary coverage. Now you want to remain in the spotlight of the media and public by setting even more agendas for testimonials, follow-up features, and stories from those who converted to buying your business’s coffee.

Agenda-Setting: If you noticed, no where did you hit the media over and over and over and over with the same material. You set the agenda for coverage on all levels, devoting your focus to specific types of coverage which hit a target audience.

Remember, your agenda is to make theirs.

*Cohen, B (1963). The press and foreign policy. New York: Harcourt.

The warmth and bright colors of Africa swept through snowy Glasgow in a gust of beautiful music, delighting a standing-room-only crowd at the lovely St Andrews in the Square.  This Celtic Connections experiment with mingling musicians from different traditions was a magnificent success.

Combine the Pride of Manchester’s Michael McGoldrick, Capercaillie’s (and Celtic Connections’s artistic director) Donald Shaw on keyboards, Irishmen Gerry O’Connor on banjo and Tony Byrne on guitar, and Scotsman James Mackintosh on percussion and you have an instant powerhouse Celtic band, which opened their set with a set of driving reels and gave the crowd an excellent selection of trad and near-trad tunes.  And then, just when you settled into that groove, enter Fatoumata Diawara, a Malian musician currently living in France, and enjoy one of those Celtic Connection twists that makes you sit up and experience music with a new delight.

She changed the game, crowding the traditional sounds closer to R&B, teasing the audience with her brilliant smiles and knowing chuckles that punctuated the chorus of “Sowa.”  The band rose to meet her music’s challenges.  Who knew that O’Connor’s banjo could put out that kind of African/rock melody?   McGoldrick’s whistles twined beautifully into her vocals, and Shaw’s keyboards added a kind of African undercurrent.  But it was Diawara, smiling happiness at everyone, who captured the audience’s imagination.  They hung on her every note and gave her their hearts.

It can’t be easy coming on after such a fiery and crowd-pleasing set, but the trio of wisecracking ace fiddlers from Ireland, Fidil, were more than ready for the challenge.  Between jokes, they tore through a tune or three, showing off their innovative stylings, complete with string-plucking, violin-drumming, and full-on bowing.  That was lovely, but the audience needed more African sunshine, and dressed in warm yellows and rust, Senegalese kora master and griot singer Solo Cissokho obliged.

At the start of the set, the lads of Fidil promised us music “from County Senegal and from County Donegal.”  They hadn’t let on that the mix was going to be so much fun.  As they pointed out, Solo taught them songs about “the woman,” and in exchange, they taught him tunes about sheep.  No matter the subject, each tune and song was a joy to experience.  Solo’s kora, a gourd-based stringed instrument, inserted a sense of mischief and fun into every plucked note; and his obvious joy pervaded the room.  Most of the audience spent this set dancing in their seats, except when a few couldn’t stand it any longer and danced in front of the stage, including Diawara.  To give us all a rest, Solo took a few moments to explain how one masters the kora in “seven paragraphs,” showing how a simple instrument can create complex tunes. They tried to end the set with “Glory Reel,” but the crowd refused to let them go that quickly, jumping to ther feet to demand an encore, wanting to hang onto the warmth of Solo’s smile and the fun that Fidil brought.

–Catherine Keegan

Artists’ websites:
Cissokho Solo www.leopardmannen.no/s/system.cissokho.asp
Fidil fidilmusic.com
Fatoumata Diawara www.myspace.com/fatoumatadiawara

Michael McGoldrick www.prideofmanchester.com/music/michaelmcgoldrick.htm
Gerry O’Connor www.gerryoconnor.com/”>www.gerryoconnor.com/
Tony Byrne
James Mackintosh www.shoogle.com/biogs.htm

The topic is the Union; that is, the American Union, which disintegrated a century and a half ago. A nation of people with a common language, a common economy, and a common heritage threw itself into the deep abyss of civil war. That conflict lasted four years. In the end, the Union was saved. However, the price was steep: 623,000 dead; a president assassinated; and a Reconstruction that never really had a chance, leading to another century of inequality for the black man and woman.

My co-author Greg Borchard and I are working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and the press, and one of the major themes of this manuscript is the tension between saving the union and not saving it. As the war happened, no one knew what the final result would be. Despite certain factors that favored the North, the outcome was not inevitable. The four-year hostilities had any number of ebbs and flows.

Dr. Borchard and I just attended a conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where renowned UNC-Chapel Hill journalism historian Donald Shaw gave a talk to the effect that Gettysburg was not quite the turning point its made out to be by most historians. Shaw contends the Battle of Atlanta in 1864 was probably more significant.

Whether one agrees with Shaw or not, the point is that the war was not a play–it was not a drama. It was a real war. It had very one-sided victories (Fredericksburg for the Confederacy) and close decisions (Stones River for the Union). It had many bloody battles with thousands of casualties. It also had thousands of battles with very little bloodshed. The point is that any number of battles were critical in to the ultimate shape of the war as it unfolded: First Bull Run, Shiloh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, and the fall of Richmond.

Once Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the Union’s salvation did not even have even a week of celebration before John Willkes Booth took aim at Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theatre. The next few decades of U.S. history offered hope, renewal, and rebirth. Something like that happened, but the South suffered severe hardship and its black population was treated with a level of disdain and disenfranchisement that belittled Lincoln’s stated cause for the war in his Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863.

The point here is that the Union was fragile when it was made at the beginning of American history, and it had to undergo an awful test near the end of its first century to genuinely survive and become a lasting democratic achievement. Moreover, it remained fairly fragile for many years after the Civil War because of the economic wasteland the South became all the way up to World War II.

And so today as the nation where I now teach and do research celebrates its 40th birthday–making it an extremely young country–I would ask my students to do a little research on the American Civil War, and to understand that all nations must go through growing pains. Those that the United Arab Emirates face are both similar and different to the United States of the 1860s; one similarity is significant immigration and a difference is a much more global economy. Both the United States of the post-Civil War period and the U.A.E. of today were/are seeing significant changes in how their worlds work–with industrialization taking root in late-nineteenth-century North America and hyper-globalism in its infancy here today.

Unions are often tenuous. For example, the partition of the newly independent India was one of the great political disasters of the twentieth century, and the current economic insecurity in Europe is challenging that relatively young union.

United countries made from former sovereign states are probably all unique. So, too, are their historical experiences. The ones that survive in the long run must be steadfastness, visionary, and willing to compromise. As the late author Shelby Foote said, the Americans have a genius for compromise. There they were in the nineteenth century thinking their little experiment at a democratic republic was going pretty well. Folks were fairly happy. Most people were small farmers making enough to get by. The cities were growing. Great inventions were being made. Transportation was progressing rapidly. Communication was undergoing a revolution with the telegraph.

Then the Americans let the issue of slavery so polarize the nation that war between North and South became the only option to settle matters in the middle of that century. A great country nearly became two mediocre countries.

In that is your cautionary tale.

Now this “source” of ours or as Katz likes to put it “opinion leader” has got to have some source of their own.  More often than not, especially when it comes to politics and other jargon that none of us feel like dedicating our lives to, that source is something like CNN or Fox News (hopefully not) or a story seen on the internet from a reliable site.  There’s step two!  That media follower, the slave to the news and multiple mediums of malice and justice.  Now here’s where I throw in a little McCombs and Shaw because depending on the source’s source, we could argue for a side we don’t believe in.  This is where we have to use caution because despite what you think, MEDIA HAS AN AGENDA!  Maybe it was debatable 50 years ago, but when the powers of the corporations running this country get their grubby paws on it, the media becomes like an onion, as Shrek would say “it has layers!”.

Media has more than enough power to sway the uneducated.  Take our current OWS movement.  (OWS being Occupy Wall Street).  If your opinion leader is a big Bill O’Reilly fan, then you look at the OWS movement as nothing but a bunch of lazy free loading good for nothings who don’t want to work for a living.  If your opinion leader is the rest of the 99%, then you’ll have quite the opposite view!

So Questions:

Is the two-step form of communication sort of like playing monkey telephone and if so, how distorted can the initial message get from the original?

Second question stemming from the first, What affects can said distorted message, if it were to go unchecked, have on an entire neighborhood/city/state/demographic, etc.?  Think of examples.

And on a closing note, as Donna said in the very first class, QUESTION EVERYTHING!

Qué aburrido… He leído la Biblioteca de Babel completa 5 veces y sigo en el mismo lugar.

Nanai dice:

En serio?¿

Nanai dice:

En dónde?¿

Chuck Norris dice:

En todas partes.

Nanai dice:

¬¬

Hannah Williams, Elon University

     The New York Times has a weekly series in its travel section highlighting tentative itineraries for spending “36 Hours” in various locations around the world. The destination selections might seem arbitrary, but they may also be somewhat systematic. In 1972, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw suggested media have an agenda-setting function, showing the news media played a role in shaping political reality during the 1968 presidential campaign in what is now known as the Chapel Hill study (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Zhu & Blood, 1996). In his review of agenda-setting research more than three decades later, McCombs (2005) reiterates the agenda-setting argument: the media set the public agenda and can be successful in telling the public not only what to think about but also how to think about it (emphasis his own, p. 546). The media’s agenda-setting function extends well beyond the contexts of news and politics, according to McCombs (2005), encompassing all media. The recent economic instability seems to have crept into every aspect of American life – ‘spend less, save more’ has become a national motto, propagated by media attention. Has it also impacted the travel writers at The New York Times? Looking at the destinations highlighted in the “36 Hours” series in comparison with the economy over the past year is there any correlation that will provide insight into the editorial selection process of travel writing destination profiles? 

     Many have studied the media’s impact on the public agenda. Agenda setting has been a critical subject of media studies since McCombs and Shaw’s aforementioned landmark Chapel Hill study and even prior to that study under other names (Zhu & Blood, 1996). Zhu and Blood (1996) argue: “It is likely that no other theoretical hypothesis in human communication research has received as much empirical attention by so many scholars and with such diverse methods as has agenda-setting” (p. 113). As of 2004, more than 400 scholarly articles concerning media agenda stetting had been published (McCombs 2005).  Most agenda-setting research focuses on agenda-setting effects, as the Chapel Hill study did (Zhu & Blood, 1996). The psychology of agenda-setting effects indicates the mindset in which people seek out information directly relates to how formative the media’s influence is. McCombs (2005) writes, “Need for orientation is defined theoretically by two concepts, relevance and uncertainty. Low relevance defines a low need for orientation; high relevance and low uncertainty, a moderate need for orientation; and high relevance and uncertainty, a high need for orientation” (p. 547). The psychological profile of someone who encounters and interacts with media will determine the degree of the media’s effectiveness in transmitting their agenda. Regardless of the readers’ preparedness, the series may manifest its agenda-setting effects. Media theorist McLuhan (1964) states, “The medium is the message,” in this the medium through which communication happens is itself part of the meaning transmitted. McLuhan (1964) argues that any medium can impose its biases on the unwary and thus must be critically evaluated. McCombs (2005) highlights, “persons with less knowledge tended to show greater agenda-setting effects” (p. 548). In this, being informed is a way to prevent susceptibleness to mass conformity. McCombs (2005) suggests a two-step flow of agenda-setting effects in which the general public may not always pay attention to the media, but opinion leaders do, and people pay attention to those opinion leaders, shaping their personal agenda’s accordingly. The ability of the media to set the public agenda has been widely researched, but McCombs (2005) also poses a question in regard to sources of the media agenda: “If the press sets the public agenda, who sets the media agenda?” (p. 548). Addressing this, McCombs (2005) argues the norms and traditions of the journalistic profession accompanied by intermedia interaction, each organization’s agenda and interaction between news organizations and sources all set the media agenda.

     Haven, Lotz and Tinic (2009) introduce a new research approach, “critical media industry studies,” to fill the gap they see between critical political economy and critical cultural studies. Their research model aims to study the macro- and micro-level elements in greater depth than previous research methods – enlisting a quantitative political-economic model combined with the critical media studies approach of using specific case studies (Haven et al., 2009). Zooming in on the big picture gives a better, more detailed snapshot into the editorial process driving media production, claim Haven et al. (2009). They write:

Following the arguments of de Certeau (1984), we envision and propose critical media industry studies through grounded institutional case studies that examine the relationships between strategies (here read as the larger economic goals and logics of large-scale cultural industries) and tactics (the ways in which cultural workers seek to negotiate, and at times perhaps subvert, the constraints imposed by institutional interests to their own purposes. (Haven et al., 2009, p. 248)

Arguing that critical media industry studies will divert attention from focusing solely on the political-economic models, they aim to explore the implications of media on everyday life and culture (Haven et al., 2009, p. 248).

     Others have studied the economy’s impact on travel. “The US is the second largest domestic tourism market in the world after China,” according to Euromonitor International (2008). Americans were also third in the list of countries for outbound international travel in 2007, following Germans and Brits (Euromonitor International, 2008). Regardless, travel is still subject to outside forces, which enable and disable travel, the availability of disposal income being one such factor (Euromonitor International, 2009a). Euromonitor International (2008) indicates, “A weak dollar and economic turmoil is expected to have a negative impact on US departures” (p. 8).  According to the study, “Domestic tourism flows are expected to increase as consumers choose to spend their holidays at home due to lack of time, growing purchasing power and concerns regarding an unstable world economy” (Euromonitor International, 2008, p. 13). Euromonitor International’s (2009b) “Global Travel and Tourism: Learning Lessons – The Impact of Economic Instability” report which found through examining past crises that “domestic and regional tourism were the main beneficiaries in periods of economic uncertainty” (p. 55). Euromonitor International (2009b) proposed, “One way tourists reduce costs during periods of economic downturn is by staying closer to home” (p. 56). Travel patterns, such as cutting costs by staying closer to home during financial crises, could also manifest themselves in the media agenda, as well as tourist behavior.

     This study proposes to examine the economy’s impact on the media’s agenda. The media’s agenda-setting role and the factors that influence the media’s agenda have been subject to critical research in the past three decades (McCombs, 2005), as have the economic factors that influence the travel (Euromonitor International, 2008; Euromonitor International, 2009a; Euromonitor International, 2009b); however, travel writing has escaped agenda-setting research. Zhu and Blood (1996) recommend using a “time series analysis” to incorporate “real world” factors like the economy into agenda-setting research, suggesting that this method is a more appropriate means to study agenda setting as a process (p. 112-113). This study proposes to analyze whether the status of the economy also influences the media agenda, combining the methodologies of agenda-setting research, specifically time series analysis, and critical media industry studies to do analyze the relationship between the economy and the travel destination selection process for The New York Times’ “36 Hours” series.

Cachorrada entre Dado e Luana

Existem fatos que também não valem Nem R$1,99. O fato da vez é o fim do namoro de Dado Dolabella (já “cornetei” ele por aqui) e Luana Piovani. Só que desta vez serei um pouco mais breve e não falarei de nenhum dos dois. Agora vou falar da imprensa brasileira que dita o que noticiado e o que será discutido.

Ontem escutei um “tititi” entre algumas pessoas comentando a respeito do fim do namoro das “celebridades” Dado e Luana. Achei muito engraçado, afinal de contas começar e terminar um namoro é algo tão normal (não disse simples, disse normal).

E aí lembrei imediatamente de um professor meu de Teorias de Comunicação, o Luis Ademir, que afirmava categoricamente que o ser humano é um mero fantoche. Dentre as justificativas (no plural) dele para tal afirmativa está justamente à agenda setting – ou teoria do agendamento, formulada por Maxwell McCombs e Donald Shaw na década de 1970. De acordo com a teoria, a mídia define a pauta para a opinião pública discutir. Assim, a mídia não dita às pessoas “o que pensar”, mas “em que pensar”.

Bom, e o que isso tem a ver com o namoro de Dado e Luana? Antes de responder, vou fazer outra pergunta: o que nós, pobres mortais, temos a ver com o término do namoro desta dupla de “mala sem alça”? N-A-D-A. E por que cargas d’água essa “praga” virou notícia por mais de duas semanas? Então a resposta é simples: quem não vale Nem R$1,99 é a mídia, é claro. Só isso? Claro que não. Os leitores que lêem esse projeto de notícia também não valem Nem R$1,99.

Enquanto uns odeiam, que é o meu caso, outros amam esse tipo de notícia que vive nos meios de comunicação. O pior de tudo é que sou a minoria e por isso tais notícias estarão sempre estampadas nos meios de comunicação.

Então é isso… Abraço virtual,

Luiz Augusto Reis Almeida

Performing songs from third solo album Downriver, she is planning an acoustic set to showcase her voice at its most powerful, following sell-out shows at Glasgow Cathedral for the annual Celtic Connections festival. The band have no plans to tour for some time, so this is a rare opportunity to see Matheson alongside Capercaillie colleagues Donald Shaw and Ewen Vernal.

Karen Matheson

Friday, Southport Arts Centre, Lord Street, Southport, 8pm, £12, £10 concs. Tel: 01704 540011. http://www.seftonarts.co.uk