The Effect of Media Coverage on Employer Reputation

Abstract

A growing body of research examines the formation of employer reputation. One potential driver is media coverage. Using content analysis data for media coverage and survey data, this study examines different dimensions of media coverage, namely, social and functional news and their impacts on employer reputation. Results show that in particular negative functional and social news affect employer reputation, although the impact of negative social news is more indirect and delayed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this article. We are also grateful to the YouGov group and the Center for Research on the Public Sphere and Society at the University of Zurich (fög) for providing us with their data.

Notes

¹ However, we assume that the automotive industry data still address all of the issues that emerge in the media because the same issue is generally reported by multiple channels and for several days in a row, a phenomenon called the continuity effect (Galtung & Ruge, 1965). Hence, the data for the automotive companies were multiplied by four so that the same media coverage scale would apply to all firms in the sample.