Popularity is not the same as influence:A study of the San Francisco Bay Area News System

David Ryfe, Donica Mensing, Hayreddin Ceker, Mehmet GunesUniversity of Nevada, Reno

Presented at the International Symposium on Online JournalismUniversity of Texas, Austin | April 2012

What are the dynamics of the emerging news network in the San Francisco Bay area, particularly in relation to agenda setting?

• 114 “seed” sites • Traditional news outlets to one-person neighborhood blogs • Updated at least weekly and focused primarily on issues of public interest

To record hyperlinks, we used a modified version of the WebSPHINX crawler software program. A crawler catalogs each hyperlink it finds on every page of a site. These data compose the corpus for our study.

Cluster of seed sites Seed sites network

Site Inbound linksmercurynews.com 57,944siliconvalley.com 32,765insidebayarea.com 28,299sf.curbed.com 25,699sf.eater.com 22,480sfgate.com 16,600almanacnews.com 14,316contracostatimes.com 12,971paloaltoonline.com 2,885sfist.com 2,763

Number of links from other news sites in the Bay Area

Site Outbound linkssf.eater.com 39,180contracostatimes.com 37,178mercurynews.com 34,270sf.curbed.com 31,840insidebayarea.com 30,140ibabuzz.com 27,806paloaltoonline.com 14,319lamorinda.patch.com 4,916coastsider.com 3,936thefrontsteps.com 2,619……..sfgate.com 26

Number of links to other news sites in the Bay Area

Traditional media sites are by far the most popular sites in the Bay Area news system

The top five sites according to the Eigenvector centrality, which measures the degree to which a node is connected to other nodes that are central to a network:

sfgate.com = 1.0mercurynews.com = .76abclocal.go.com = .63insidebayarea.com = .62contracostatimes.com = .58

Media News Group links in and out

Preferential attachment theory

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pdw/topology/ScaleFree.html

Power Law Distribution

• Nine of the 114 sites attracted 85% of all in-bound links.

• Seven of the 114 sites account for 87% of all out-bound links.

• Seven of the nine most linked-to sites are owned by traditional media companies.

Measures of “closeness centrality” in the Bay area news system

Site Closeness Measure

Alamanacnews.com 4.009Danvilleexpress.com 4Halfmoonbay.patch.com 3.91Belmont-ca.patch.com 3.91Sfbayview.com 3.78Pacificsun.com 3.76Communityrejuvenation.blogspot.com 3.6Claycord.com 3.51Siliconvalley.com 3.4

Pleasantonweekly.com 3.32

Links to SFGate.com

Major nonprofits In and out links to other seed sites

Argument 1: Links can represent popularity but not necessarily influence. Sites that attract the most links are not necessarily the most influential.

Argument 2:The linking practices of traditional news sites in the Bay area reveal an emphasis on commercialism and a voluntary weakening of agenda setting authority.

Argument 3:An emerging network of nonprofit news sites has the potential for agenda setting influence that could fill the void left by mainstream media.

Interested in collaboration?Email me: dmensing@unr.edu