Corporate Reputation and the News Media: A Program of Research on Media Intelligence
Posted September 4th, 2008Craig Carroll
UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication
This presentation covers a program of research examining the relationship between big business and the news media. The purpose of this presentation is to explore what connections there may be between my research on organizational news coverage and the research of SILS faculty and students.
My research covers three streams: media effects on corporate reputation (media as an independent variable), influences on the production of business news (media as a dependent variable), and media reputation as a proxy for corporate reputation. There are a number of theoretical frameworks that apply to these research streams. This presentation will be more meta-methodological in nature. The large scale question concerns the effects on ongoing media visibility (and publicity) on organizational survival rates. What difference does public relations make for the survival of organizations?
To answer this question, I am developing a relational database that houses news coverage of the largest 1000 companies in the state of North Carolina. Each empirical study will be growing out of the data will examine the same set of organizations with new variables, new observations, and some new theory.
Craig Carroll (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is Director of the newly formed Carolina Observatory on Corporate Reputation, which has 2 doctoral students, 18 undergraduate researchers, and 20 human coders. Carroll teaches courses in public relations and media intelligence.
His doctoral dissertation examined how the mass media influence perceptions of corporate reputation, matching a media analysis of The New York Times content on sample of 1000 companies with a public opinion poll by Harris Interactive, called the Annual Reputation Quotient Study, regularly profiled in the Wall Street Journal. He serves as Chair of the Public Relations division of the International Communication Association, the leading academic association within the communication discipline. He is currently completing a series of empirical papers out of his doctoral dissertation. The project here describes his long term program.