Does McLuhan’s Idea Stand Up for Millennials? Testing Whether the Medium is the Message in Political Organization Public Relationships

Examining McLuhan’s (1964) classic adage that the “medium is the message,” this experimental design presented participants with the three versions of the same message content. Manipulating medium as an online press release, blog post, or online video, the research here found that medium does play a role in shaping the receiver’s perceived relationship with an organization. Conversely, medium does not impact one’s assessment of credibility. Set in a digital political public relations context, this study attempts to connect public relations’ most heuristic theory in the examination in the state of ever-evolving digital media

Candidates for Accreditation in Public Relations: Role Enactment and the Social Media Synapse

Public relations roles have been studied for decades and around the world, but no research published to date examines the role enactment of practitioners who choose to sit for professional certification in public relations. This survey finds that Accreditationtrack professionals (N = 150) align with the general-population practitioner in some respects, such as role enactment and gender, but differ in others, such as experience and role enactment. In determining how social media use integrates into the roles literature, the data here support a 3-factor solution, with a social media synapse enactment factor standing alone

Credibility or Credulity? Examining Political Organization-Public Relationships in an Election of Interloping Candidates

This national online survey (N = 493) examined the political organization-public relationship (POPR) that voters perceived with their own political party and their opposing political party, as well as voters’ assessment of the credibility of candidates running for president during the primary season of the 2016 election. Results indicated that although credibility assessment of one’s own party’s candidate was much as expected, POPR with the Democratic Party was generally stronger than that with the Republican Party. Data showed no evidence that a poor POPR with one’s own party would drive voters to support interloper candidates. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of POPR with the opposing party and what weak relationships may mean for parties in the long term

doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.06.008

a b s t r a c t This study examined the impact of information subsidies on media coverage during a crisis. Using the July 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict as a backdrop, this research reviewed access that U.S. military public affairs officers provided the media and analyzed subsequent coverage for the presence of the military's message. Coverage was more neutral to positive than negative. Items containing organizational messages were more positive; those quoting practitionerfacilitated sources introduced organizational messages into coverage and generated more positive coverage. Access to information subsidies had a positive impact on coverage and aided in the successful transfer of attribute salience from practitioners to the media. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. In times of crisis, public relations practitioners often do not have to work as hard to get the attention of the media -and subsequently the public -to focus news coverage on their organizations and issues. Instead, practitioners facilitate coverage by the media that helps communicate the organization's perspective through the independent third-party verification reporters provide. During these times, practitioners are likely to see an increase in journalists using the information subsidies practitioners provide and more issue salience transferred in what is known as the agenda-building process. As a result, the messages organizations develop in response to crises can help define issues in media coverage of events. In cases such as these, practitioners' roles move beyond simple agenda-setting to attribute agenda-setting as a part of the agenda-building process. In an effort to understand how these processes interact with other information subsidy variables, we examined the actual information subsidies military public affairs provided reporters during the military-led evacuation of Americans from Lebanon. In essence, this study tested two ideas-first, information subsidies provided by practitioners introduce organizational messages that result in a transfer of salience to media coverage. Second, increased media access has the potential to result in a more positive tone of coverage. This research does not propose that information subsidies and access are the only factors at work in defining attributes of a media-covered issue, but rather begins work in uncovering relationships between such variables. The organization message examined here is viewed through the lens of agenda building/attribute agenda setting. Most attribute agenda-setting studies examine attributes from the journalism perspective

YouTube-ification of political talk: An examination of persuasion appeals in viral video.

In 2008, U.S. Internet users watched 14 billion videos on YouTube. During the 2008 presidential campaign, voters rated watching YouTube political videos as one of the top three most popular online political activities. But to what degree are YouTube political videos influential of viewers’ perceptions, and to what degree does the source of the video make an impact? Similar to all other new forms of online communication, the effects of YouTube clips on consumers of political information, and the credibility of these messages, have yet to be understood. This study takes a step into that direction through a three-cell posttest-only experimental design that exposed participants to three YouTube clips about health care, each clip containing a different persuasive appeal (source or ethos, logic or logos, and emotion or pathos). Results revealed that the ethos appeal ranked as the most credible appeal, followed by logos and pathos, a somewhat promising finding that users resist being swayed by emotion or hard numbers and pay attention to message source. No relationship was found between the appeals and political information efficacy or the political cynicism of participants

An Examination of the Role pf Online Social Media in Journalists\u27 Source Mix

Using telephone surveys of business/financial journalists in the United States (n =200), this research investigates the agenda-building role of social media content in journalists’ work. Understanding that more non-public relations content from user-generated and social network sites, like YouTube and Twitter, are fast becoming resources for journalists to get story ideas, break scandals, and find sources, we began this scholarly work to determine the frequency of such uses of social media. Overall, findings indicate very little use of social media by these business journalists. Results and implications for public relations practitioners are discussed in detail