The Rise and Fall of Hot-Issue Publics: Relationships that Develop From Media Coverage of Events and Crises

Abstract

Research over the years using Grunig's situational theory has identified hot-issue publics along with active, aware, latent, and nonpublics. Hot-issue publics typically communicate actively only about a single problem that involves nearly everyone in the population and that has received extensive media coverage. Hot-issue publics tend to emerge when a triggering event occurs, such as an accident, crisis, or media controversy. Hot-issue publics, however, tend to dissipate after media coverage of the problem subsides. This study addresses the extent to which organizations need relationships with hot-issue publics or whether they need only to address media coverage of a crisis at the time it occurs. More than 90 qualitative interviews were conducted over several years with individuals about a number of hot issues. Results suggest that most hot-issue publics do not become active publics but that they remain aware after the problem gets less attention. Thus, organizations need to use principles of crisis communication to cultivate a short-term relationship with hot-issue publics and to continue a longer-term relationship with the now more aware public.

Notes

¹Grunig called this concept information processing in most of his research, but Kim and Grunig (2011) changed the name to information attending to avoid confusion with other theories of information processing that define it as cognitive processing of information rather than as behavioral attention to information. Kim and Grunig (2011) and Kim, Grunig, and Ni (2010) extended the situational theory of publics into a broader situational theory of problem solving, which includes concepts of information transmission and selection as well as acquisition (seeking and attending). Because the data reported here were collected before this revision of the theory, this article is limited to the situational theory of publics rather than using the broader theory of problem solving. In addition, the situational theory of publics is adequate for developing an initial understanding of the behavior of hot-issue publics.