Online Media Relations as an Information Subsidy: Quality of Fortune 500 Companies' Websites and Relationships to Media Salience |
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| Authors: | Soo Jung Moon Ki Deuk Hyun |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Mass Communications , University of West Georgia;2. School of Communications , Grand Valley State University |
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| Abstract: | This study probes relationships among corporate financial resources, web-based corporate media relations, and media attention to corporations to determine whether online media relations functions as an effective information subsidy in the agenda-building process. It compares the quality of online press rooms of Fortune 500 companies with the number of news articles about those same companies published by five major news outlets in the United States. A causal model was supported predicting that resource-rich companies have better-operating online newsrooms with more diverse informational and interactive components, which in turn generate more news stories about the companies. This result suggests that the effectiveness of corporate Web activities depends on financial and professional resources and contradicts earlier expectations that the dominance of resource-rich organizations in communication would be undermined by the Internet. |
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