This study analyzed the news ecosystem and linking patterns of 114 news sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. It found that traditional media sites like the Mercury News and SFGate received the most inbound links, but did not necessarily have the most influence. While these sites were popular, their outbound linking emphasized commercialism over agenda setting. The study also found that a network of nonprofit news sites has the potential to influence the agenda and fill the void left by mainstream media outlets.

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 sitesSeed sites network

5. Site Inbound links
mercurynews.com 57,944
siliconvalley.com 32,765
insidebayarea.com 28,299
sf.curbed.com 25,699
sf.eater.com 22,480
sfgate.com 16,600
almanacnews.com 14,316
contracostatimes.com 12,971
paloaltoonline.com 2,885
sfist.com 2,763
Number of links from other news sites in the Bay Area

6. Site Outbound links
sf.eater.com 39,180
contracostatimes.com 37,178
mercurynews.com 34,270
sf.curbed.com 31,840
insidebayarea.com 30,140
ibabuzz.com 27,806
paloaltoonline.com 14,319
lamorinda.patch.com 4,916
coastsider.com 3,936
thefrontsteps.com 2,619
……..sfgate.com 26
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
Site Closeness Measure
Alamanacnews.com 4.009
Danvilleexpress.com 4
Halfmoonbay.patch.com 3.91
Belmont-ca.patch.com 3.91
Sfbayview.com 3.78
Pacificsun.com 3.76
Communityrejuvenation.blogspot.com 3.6
Claycord.com 3.51
Siliconvalley.com 3.4
Pleasantonweekly.com 3.32

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