News about newspaper advertisers: To what extent can corporate advertising budgets predict editorial uptake and coverage of corporate press releases?

News value theory aims to predict a story’s chance of being selected for publication based on news factors and ascribed news values. News values can also predict the coverage of corporate press releases. For news decisions, a newspaper’s revenue model may force editors to consider whether the source of a press release is an advertising client, despite the ‘separation of church and state’. In addition, for business journalism, corporate press releases have become an increasingly important news source. This study combines news values and advertiser weight to predict news coverage of press releases of banks in the news of partly and fully advertising-funded newspapers in Switzerland. Results show that advertiser importance can explain press release coverage concerning article length and tone in few cases, but has no universal news value. Public relations material is also not used as editorial subsidy for news. Larger companies are more successful in terms of press release uptake. However, their articles consist of a greater share of non-public relations material. Thus, our findings confirm editorial independence instead of copy-paste or obsequious journalism

Wolsink et al., Dual Cognitive Pathways to Voice Quality

We investigate the involvement of Working Memory Capacity (WMC, the cognitive resource necessary for controlled elaborate thinking) in voice behavior (speaking up with suggestions, problems, and opinions to change the organization). While scholars assume voice requires elaborate thinking, some empirical evidence suggests voice might be more automatic. To explain this discrepancy, we distinguish between voice quantity (frequency of voice) and voice quality (novelty and value of voiced information) and propose that WMC is important for voice quality, but not voice quantity. Furthermore, we propose that people who voice often need less WMC to reach high voice quality than people who voice rarely. To test our ideas, we conducted three studies: a between-participant lab-study, a within-participant experiment, and a multi-source field-study. These studies confirmed that voice quantity is unrelated to WMC. Voice quality is positively related to WMC, but only for those who rarely voice. This indicates that the decision to voice (quantity) might be more automatic and intuitive than often assumed, whereas its value to the organization (quality), relies more on the degree of cognitive elaboration of the voicer. It also suggests that frequent and infrequent voicers use distinct cognitive pathways to voice high quality information: frequent voicers improvise, while infrequent voicers elaborate

Wolsink et al., Dual Cognitive Pathways to Voice Quality

We investigate the involvement of Working Memory Capacity (WMC, the cognitive resource necessary for controlled elaborate thinking) in voice behavior (speaking up with suggestions, problems, and opinions to change the organization). While scholars assume voice requires elaborate thinking, some empirical evidence suggests voice might be more automatic. To explain this discrepancy, we distinguish between voice quantity (frequency of voice) and voice quality (novelty and value of voiced information) and propose that WMC is important for voice quality, but not voice quantity. Furthermore, we propose that people who voice often need less WMC to reach high voice quality than people who voice rarely. To test our ideas, we conducted three studies: a between-participant lab-study, a within-participant experiment, and a multi-source field-study. These studies confirmed that voice quantity is unrelated to WMC. Voice quality is positively related to WMC, but only for those who rarely voice. This indicates that the decision to voice (quantity) might be more automatic and intuitive than often assumed, whereas its value to the organization (quality), relies more on the degree of cognitive elaboration of the voicer. It also suggests that frequent and infrequent voicers use distinct cognitive pathways to voice high quality information: frequent voicers improvise, while infrequent voicers elaborate

Dual cognitive pathways to voice quality: Frequent voicers improvise, infrequent voicers elaborate.

We investigate the involvement of Working Memory Capacity (WMC, the cognitive resource necessary for controlled elaborate thinking) in voice behavior (speaking up with suggestions, problems, and opinions to change the organization). While scholars assume voice requires elaborate thinking, some empirical evidence suggests voice might be more automatic. To explain this discrepancy, we distinguish between voice quantity (frequency of voice) and voice quality (novelty and value of voiced information) and propose that WMC is important for voice quality, but less for voice quantity. Furthermore, we propose that frequent voicers rely less on WMC to reach high voice quality than people who voice rarely. To test our ideas, we conducted three studies: a between-participant lab-study, a within-participant experiment, and a multi-source field-study. All studies supported our expectation that voice quantity is unrelated to WMC, and that voice quality is positively related to WMC, but only for those who rarely voice. This indicates that the decision to voice (quantity) might be more automatic and intuitive than often assumed, whereas its value to the organization (quality), relies more on the degree of cognitive elaboration of the voicer. It also suggests that frequent and infrequent voicers use distinct cognitive pathways to voice high-quality information: frequent voicers improvise, while infrequent voicers elaborate