Tech Bloggers vs. Tech Journalists in Innovation Journalism

The rising power of tech blogs has not gone unnoticed by traditional media professionals, who are aware of the trend that tech blogs often have the upper hand in Innovation Journalism. Countless tech bloggers strive to be the opinion leaders and some journalists praise their supremacy: 'If anybody knows what's going to happen next in technology, it's the bloggers'. The study integrated two research traditions: Two-step flow and agenda setting and focused on the importance of early recognizers who collect, filter and promote the flow of information. The study addressed the question: Do traditional journalists (media agenda) adopt the issue salience assigned by tech bloggers (blogs agenda) or vice versa? In other words, are bloggers the new agenda setters, or is the classic agenda setting model also preserved in the tech field? The core hypothesis was that the salience of tech objects will be transferred from tech blogs to traditional media. The quantitative analyses were conducted in the following steps: 1. The tech agenda of topics discussed in traditional media (# of articles). 2. The tech agenda of topics discussed by tech blogs (# of posts). 3. Spearman rank-order correlation. 4. Time-series analysis (Granger tests for causality). 5. Network Agenda Setting (NAS) model correlations (QAP-Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression analysis). Technological coverage from English-language news and blog posts was collected from all of 2012. 347 keywords were searched in seven groups: 1. Newspaper sites, 2. Television sites, 3. Magazine sites, 4. Websites of traditional media as a whole, 5. Elite newsroom blogs, 6. Independent blogs, 7. Tech blogs as a whole. Approximately 2,500 queries led to 1,500,000 records. The Granger-causality and QAP tests resulted in strong, positive and significant correlations: The tech coverage on blogs predicted the tech coverage on traditional media and not vice versa. Consequently, the tech bloggers were identified as the early recognizers that initiate the classical agenda-setting process to traditional media. It is a unique indication of a role reversal that occurs in the emerging digital era. The study also provided empirical evidence for a new theoretical and methodological development -the NAS model: the relationships between the tech keywords transferred from one communication channel to another. Thus, the salience of the network relationships among objects, in addition to the rank-order of those objects, can also be transferred between different media outlets. Those main findings on the role of tech bloggers in the diffusion of innovation are useful for future studies and also relevant to the industry, including tech companies, PR agencies, tech journalists, and bloggers.