Popularity is not the same as influence: A study of the San Francisco Bay Area News System David Ryfe, Donica Mensing, Hayreddin Ceker, Mehmet Gunes University of Nevada, Reno Presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism University of Texas, Austin | April 2012
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Popularity is not the same as influence: A study of the San Francisco Bay Area News System David Ryfe, Donica Mensing, Hayreddin Ceker, Mehmet Gunes University.
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Popularity is not the same as influence:A study of the San Francisco Bay Area News System
David Ryfe, Donica Mensing, Hayreddin Ceker, Mehmet GunesUniversity of Nevada, Reno
Presented at the International Symposium on Online JournalismUniversity of Texas, Austin | April 2012
What are the dynamics of the emerging news network in the San Francisco Bay area, particularly in relation to agenda setting?
• 114 “seed” sites • Traditional news outlets to one-person neighborhood blogs • Updated at least weekly and focused primarily on issues of public interest
To record hyperlinks, we used a modified version of the WebSPHINX crawler software program. A crawler catalogs each hyperlink it finds on every page of a site. These data compose the corpus for our study.
Number of links to other news sites in the Bay Area
Traditional media sites are by far the most popular sites in the Bay Area news system
The top five sites according to the Eigenvector centrality, which measures the degree to which a node is connected to other nodes that are central to a network:
Major nonprofits In and out links to other seed sites
Argument 1: Links can represent popularity but not necessarily influence. Sites that attract the most links are not necessarily the most influential.
Argument 2:The linking practices of traditional news sites in the Bay area reveal an emphasis on commercialism and a voluntary weakening of agenda setting authority.
Argument 3:An emerging network of nonprofit news sites has the potential for agenda setting influence that could fill the void left by mainstream media.