Cultural Agenda Setting and the Role of Critics (original) (raw)
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In this study we investigate and expand agenda setting theory in the context of the market for art-house films. First, we test first and second-level agenda setting hypotheses, according to which higher media visibility and favorable media valence of a particular film are expected to have positive effects on public salience. Second, we expand agenda setting theory by adding critical valence as an important influence of public salience within cultural contexts. Our findings suggest that while higher media visibility, favorable media valence, and critical valence have positive effects on public salience, they are also independent of one another in carrying salience over to the public.
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2015
This article shows that blockbuster movies are predestined to receive media coverage not only because they are increasingly professionally promoted but also because they carry both "publicist" and media commercial news value. e promotional culture surrounding the blockbuster movie event, including the attention devoted to celebrity actors and directors, attracts media audiences, while the movie itself may stimulate sociocultural debate on lm esthetics, art, celebrity culture, and the cultural industries. Taking our point of departure in mediatization theory, we analyze the interwoven communicative forms of the lm industry and the printed press. We exemplify our arguments with the coverage in Danish newspapers of 3 blockbusters, representing different points in time in the more recent history of lm and news media.
Journal of Cultural Economics, 2007
Critics and their reviews can play an important role in consumer decision making in general, and film choice in particular. In this study, we propose that consumers of art house movies are being led by film reviews when making a film choice (influence effect), whereas consumers of mainstream movies are hypothesized to rely mainly on other sources of information. Thus, in the latter case the review does not influence the moviegoer, but may still be a reflection of the ultimate success of the movie (predictor effect). Using the Dutch film industry as our empirical setting, we study the effects of reviews on the opening weekend and on the cumulative box office revenue. Our research shows that the number and size of film reviews in Dutch newspapers directly influence the behavior of the art-movie-going public in their film choice. The number and size of film reviews of mainstream movies, on the other hand, only predict movie performance.
First Monday, 2015
In 1965, Galtung and Ruge published an influential list of news values. Fifty years later, my article takes this list to demonstrate how mass media principles still apply when building audiences for an independent film in the Internet age. The article builds on a constructivist approach that news values can be actively formulated and stressed. It uses the case study of independent film project 15Malaysia, illustrating how this project, though unknowingly, actively created news value to convince opinion leaders of the worth of their project and, ultimately, build an audience of over two million viewers.
Evaluative schemas and the attention of critics in the US film industry
Industrial and Corporate Change, 2006
This article explores the constraints evaluative schemas place on critics' allocation of attention. Prior research suggests that a critic's ability to establish himself as an expert of the market is based on the appeal to a rationalized and defensible system of standards for evaluating products. In this article, I argue that this creates a fundamental bias in the allocation of critical attention such that critics will demonstrate a tendency to favor arenas in which they have developed clear and structured schemas for evaluation. As a result, producers within such categories will receive disproportionately greater critical attention. I test and find support for this hypothesis within the context of the US feature film industry. The implications of this bias in terms of producer legitimacy are discussed.
Setting the agenda: Different strategies of a Mass Media in a model of cultural dissemination
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016
Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media (MM). However, the importance of a given new can be stimulated by the Media by assigning newspaper's pages or time in TV programs. In this sense, we say that the Media has the power to "set the agenda", i.e., it decides which new is important and which is not. On the other hand, the Media can know people's concerns through, for instance, websites or blogs where they express their opinions, and then it can use this information in order to be more appealing to an increasing number of people. In this work, we study different scenarios in an agentbased model of cultural dissemination, in which a given Mass Media has a specific purpose: To set a particular topic of discussion and impose its point of view to as many social agents as it can. We model this by making the Media has a fixed feature, representing its point of view in the topic of discussion, while it tries to attract new consumers, by taking advantage of feedback mechanisms, represented by adaptive features. We explore different strategies that the Media can adopt in order to increase the affinity with potential consumers and then the probability to be successful in imposing this particular topic.
How Critical Are Critical Reviews? The Box Office Effects of Film Critics, Star Power, and Budgets
Journal of Marketing, 2003
The authors investigate how critics affect the box office performance of films and how the effects may be moderated by stars and budgets. The authors examine the process through which critics affect box office revenue, that is, whether they influence the decision of the film going public (their role as influencers), merely predict the decision (their role as predictors), or do both. They find that both positive and negative reviews are correlated with weekly box office revenue over an eight-week period, suggesting that critics play a dual role: They can influence and predict box office revenue. However, the authors find the impact of negative reviews (but not positive reviews) to diminish over time, a pattern that is more consistent with critics' role as influencers. The authors then compare the positive impact of good reviews with the negative impact of bad reviews to find that film reviews evidence a negativity bias; that is, negative reviews hurt performance more than positive reviews help performance, but only during the first week of a film's run. Finally, the authors examine two key moderators of critical reviews, stars and budgets, and find that popular stars and big budgets enhance box office revenue for films that receive more negative critical reviews than positive critical reviews but do little for films that receive more positive reviews than negative reviews. Taken together, the findings not only replicate and extend prior research on critical reviews and box office performance but also offer insight into how film studios can strategically manage the review process to enhance box office revenue.