Agenda setting and the "new" news: Patterns of issue importance among readers of the paper and online versions of the New York Times

This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of politi-cal issues. Using data from a weeklong experiment in which subjects either read the print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times for 5 days adjusted their agendas in response to that exposure and that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers. In the process of disseminating information about what Walter Lippmann called the “world outside, ” the press does much more than merely inform its audiences. By selecting which public affairs stories will be reported and by giving special prominence to some stories, the news media suggest which peo-ple, issues, and events are especially deserving of public attention. Given the importance of this attention-directing function, we might ask whether the nature of agenda setting by the news media might change as the technologies of news dissemination adapt to the formats of new communication media. Newspaper readers quickly learn to navigate the familiar signals employed by editors to set the momentous apart from the trivial: Few readers miss the point that long front-page articles with banner headlines are more important than short inside stories. How accurately are news agendas perceived by these same readers when Web-based news sources are used in place of tradi-tional newspapers? The agenda-setting tradition of mass media effects research has long been interested in the ways that news formats influence the perceived importance of issues in the news. For instance, one study of survey respondents foun