Presentation Style and Beyond: How Print Newspapers and Online News Expand Awareness of Public Affairs Issues

Abstract

Traditional newspapers have been shown to improve knowledge about politics and other societal issues and to widen the perceived public agenda, but what of their online counterparts and other news sites on the Internet? The consequences of differences in presentation style are addressed. A large survey representative of the Dutch adult population is used to examine how much print newspapers and online news expand the perceived public agenda, both in terms of its extent in general and within politics in particular. Our results show that printed newspapers are more effective than online newspapers in increasing the overall number of perceived topics and the number of political topics, but only if readers are interested and rely on newspapers. Nonpaper news sites, however, seem to widen the overall and the political public agenda even without specific interest and reliance of their users.

Notes

¹In their “peripheral route” of persuasion, Petty and Cacioppo (1986) also drew on the idea of being confronted inadvertently with information not necessarily sought: The peripheral route leads to—an admittedly superficial—attention to persuasive messages, if only there are enough (and sufficiently striking) chance encounters with those messages.

²The completion rates were as follows: Of all persons randomly selected for the interview, 26% could not be contacted (no answer or busy lines) and 26% refused; 7% was not contacted a second time after having agreed to have an interview on another hour.

³TNS NIPO provided the population rates.

⁴Online news in the Netherlands is very similar to online news in the United States, for instance: There are Dutch versions of Google news, Planet news, Yahoo! news, MSN news, and the like.

⁵Education was gauged as one's highest school or university degree.

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