ORIGINAL ARTICLE Issue News and Corporate Reputation: Applying the Theories of Agenda Setting and Issue Ownership in the Field of Business Communication

Effects of issues in business news on corporate reputation are often assumed, but less often put to a test. To study these effects, this study combines a recent extension of agenda-setting theory—the second level of agenda setting—with issue ownership theory. A content analysis of business news is linked to a panel survey to measure corporate associations and corporate reputation. The results provide empirical evidence both for the second level of agenda setting and for issue ownership, thereby showing that theories from the field of political communication are valuable for understanding the effects of issues in business news. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00300.x Although scholars have studied both corporate reputation and media effects for decades, only a few attempts have been made to test media effect theories in the field of corporate reputation. Stone, Dunphy, and Bernstein (1996) stressed the need for empirical research on this topic, but little was done for nearly 25 years. Fombrun and Shanley (1990) conducted a pioneering study in this field. Their focus on the amount and the tone of news recurs in two other studies on the effects of news o