The interplay between media-for-monitoring and media-for-searching: How news media trigger searches and edits in <i>Wikipedia</i>

Abstract

This study investigates how traditional news media and Internet services have become entangled in recipients’ habits of gathering information on current topics. Push media enable citizens to scan the issue environment while pull media enable them to seek out in-depth information if information needs have been elicited. Furthermore, content quality in many pull media may increase when more users generate content, removing flaws and adding information. We expected that TV and newspaper coverage of an issue will lead to increases in (a) searches for and (b) user edits in related articles in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Our findings reliably support the hypotheses, but the extent to which the count of page views increases is highly dependent on the topic at hand and how the search keyword relates to the issue. This matches the predictions of information-seeking theories and the dynamic transactional model of media effects.