1. Popularity is not the same as influence: A study of the San Francisco Bay Area News System David Ryfe, Donica Mensing, Hayreddin Ceker, Mehmet Gunes University of Nevada, Reno Presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism University of Texas, Austin | April 2012

2. What are the dynamics of the emerging news network in the San Francisco Bay area, particularly in relation to agenda setting?

3. 114 “seed” sites Traditional news outlets to one-person neighborhood blogs Updated at least weekly and focused primarily on issues of public interest To record hyperlinks, we used a modified version of the WebSPHINX crawler software program. A crawler catalogs each hyperlink it finds on every page of a site. These data compose the corpus for our study.

4. Cluster of seed sites Seed sites network

5. SiteInbound links mercurynews.com57,944 siliconvalley.com32,765 insidebayarea.com28,299 sf.curbed.com25,699 sf.eater.com22,480 sfgate.com16,600 almanacnews.com14,316 contracostatimes.com12,971 paloaltoonline.com2,885 sfist.com2,763 Number of links from other news sites in the Bay Area

6. SiteOutbound links sf.eater.com39,180 contracostatimes.com37,178 mercurynews.com34,270 sf.curbed.com31,840 insidebayarea.com30,140 ibabuzz.com27,806 paloaltoonline.com14,319 lamorinda.patch.com4,916 coastsider.com3,936 thefrontsteps.com2,619 ……..sfgate.com26 Number of links to other news sites in the Bay Area

7. Traditional media sites are by far the most popular sites in the Bay Area news system The top five sites according to the Eigenvector centrality, which measures the degree to which a node is connected to other nodes that are central to a network: sfgate.com = 1.0 mercurynews.com =.76 abclocal.go.com =.63 insidebayarea.com =.62 contracostatimes.com =.58

8. Media News Group links in and out

9. Preferential attachment theory

10. http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~pdw/topology/ScaleFree.html

11. Power Law Distribution Nine of the 114 sites attracted 85% of all in-bound links. Seven of the 114 sites account for 87% of all out-bound links. Seven of the nine most linked-to sites are owned by traditional media companies.

12. Measures of “closeness centrality” in the Bay area news system SiteCloseness Measure Alamanacnews.com4.009 Danvilleexpress.com4 Halfmoonbay.patch.com3.91 Belmont-ca.patch.com3.91 Sfbayview.com3.78 Pacificsun.com3.76 Communityrejuvenation.blogspot.com3.6 Claycord.com3.51 Siliconvalley.com3.4 Pleasantonweekly.com3.32

13. Links to SFGate.com

14. Major nonprofits In and out links to other seed sites

15. Argument 1: Links can represent popularity but not necessarily influence. Sites that attract the most links are not necessarily the most influential.

16. Argument 2: The linking practices of traditional news sites in the Bay area reveal an emphasis on commercialism and a voluntary weakening of agenda setting authority.

17. Argument 3: An emerging network of nonprofit news sites has the potential for agenda setting influence that could fill the void left by mainstream media.

18. Interested in collaboration? Email me: dmensing@unr.edu