Who takes the lead? Investigating the reciprocal relationship between organizational and news agendas

This study introduces the element of time to investigate the causal relation between organizational and news media agendas. Reciprocal time-series analyses were applied to daily-level aggregated press releases (n = 17,221) and news articles (n = 74,067). Results indicate that on the first level of agenda building, organizational and news agendas are intertwined in an intimate relation of reciprocal influence, in which organizations more often take the lead. Conversely, results suggest that on the second level of agenda building, organizational and news agendas influence each other less often. Organizational and newspaper characteristics proved useful to map the contingency of agenda-building effects. The findings suggest that organizational sources are more influential in the news discovery phase compared with the news-gathering phase, and imply that the unidirectional conceptualization of news media as a channel to vent organizational messages is too narrow.