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Despite the formidable consequences for firms of having their misconduct publicized—and thus scandalized—we know little about why only some misconduct instances become scandals beyond the idea that high-status firms' transgressions are scandalized more often. Focusing on the media's essential role in scandalizing misconduct, we take a media routines perspective to theorize how the status of past transgressors inside and outside the focal transgressor's industry creates different contexts that shape the of scandalization likelihood. We argue that the prevalence of past transgressions by high-status firms within the industry leads journalists to scrutinize the misconduct more, amplifying the effect of the focal firm's status by highlighting its commonalities with past transgressors. Conversely, the prevalence of transgressions by high-status firms outside the industry attenuates the firm status effect on scandalization by directing media attention outside the industry, limiting the information that can be inferred from firm status. Past transgressors' status and their categorical proximity to current transgressors serve as boundary conditions for the scandalizing effect of status. Our contribution lies in elucidating contextual factors that influence how status acts as an antecedent of scandals, and explaining how status and categories feed media routines that influence the likelihood of firm misconduct being scandalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A longstanding literature suggests that earnings provide the market with relevant information about firm performance, but one often overlooked benefit is their role in disciplining market expectations. This study examines the role of earnings announcements in constraining potential mispricing associated with firm-specific media sentiment. We show that media sentiment-driven quarterly returns (orthogonal to risk factors and fundamental news) largely reverse when public earnings are released. Our results suggest that quarterly earnings announcements play an important role in reducing media sentiment-related mispricing. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G14; L82; M41. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies are increasingly held accountable for their corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). However, the extent to which a CSI event damages the firm largely depends on the coverage of this event in high-reach news media. Using the theory of news value developed in communications research, the authors explain the amount of media coverage by introducing a set of variables related to the event, the involved brand, and media outlet. The authors analyze a sample of 1,054 CSI events that were reported in 77 leading media outlets in five countries in the period 2008–2014. Estimation results reveal many drivers. For example, the number of media covering the story may be 39% higher for salient and strong brands. 80% more media report the event if a foreign brand is involved in a domestic CSI event. When a brand advertises heavily or exclusively in a news medium, this reduces the likelihood of the news medium to cover negative stories about the brand. The average financial loss at the U.S. stock market due to a CSI event amounts to US$321 million. However, the market reacts to the event only if 4 or more U.S. high-reach media outlets report on the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we examine how a firm's corporate philanthropic behavior may affect its subsequent acquisitions. Drawing upon stakeholder theory, we argue that firms may strategically use philanthropic donations to obtain support or approval from stakeholders so as to advance subsequent acquisitions, suggesting a positive relationship between corporate giving and corporate acquisitions in terms of both acquisition number and value. We further contend that stakeholders' support for acquisitions would be even more critical for firms with negative or conservative attitudes to external stakeholders. Therefore, it is expected that both negative media coverage and controversial industry sectors will strengthen the positive relationship between corporate giving and subsequent corporate acquisitions. Analyses of publicly listed manufacturing firms in China during 2004–2015 largely support our predictions. This study deepens our understanding about the drivers of corporate giving and highlights its role in corporate acquisitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management scholars have demonstrated that CEOs look to cues provided from external stakeholders when determining the direction and timing of strategic action. Research has focused on "hard" forms of external performance feedback, primarily in the form of stock market reactions. To understand both whether and to what degree "soft" external performance feedback of strategic actions influences the subsequent strategic decisions of firms, we build our arguments from and contribute to upper echelons theory. We argue that negative media reactions to the announcement of a major acquisition will shape the degree to which the firm will engage in subsequent acquisition activity. However, our theory suggests that an important individual attribute, CEO temporal focus, will influence how sensitive CEOs are to media coverage. Using a sample of 747 large acquisitions made between 2006 and 2011, we find strong support for our hypotheses. Additionally, our supplemental analysis demonstrates an important difference between the influence of stock market and media reactions following an acquisition. While CEO temporal focus shapes which CEOs will be influenced by media reactions, it appears that CEOs' propensity to be influenced by stock market reactions is not moderated by their temporal focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activities that hazard the possibility of increased scrutiny are an unavoidable reality for many firms. While managers may face the need to engage in these activities, there is little research on when managers decide to do so. Existing theoretical perspectives on status quo deviations have not sufficiently addressed how managers order the firm’s essential activities that differ primarily in terms of the scrutiny those activities engender. Drawing from concepts in the accounting and political science literatures, we advance a “scrutiny-bundling” perspective that suggests that firms engage in scrutiny-hazarding action in the wake of social disapproval, assessed in this study via negative media coverage. We further theorize that a strong linkage between the focus of media coverage and the specific scrutiny-hazarding action exacerbates this relationship. We then contend that managers at firms that are either large in size or that perform well relative to their aspirations are less sensitive to social disapproval, and are therefore less likely to engage in scrutiny bundling. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 100 firms in the upstream petroleum industry and find general support for our theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SEC requires public companies to disclose material information on Form 8-K within four days of a triggering event. We show that on 8-K event and filing dates, there is significant abnormal attention on Bloomberg terminals, which are a source of information for institutional investors, while traditional media attention tends to be higher on filing days. Significant price discovery occurs on the event date and on the days between that day and the filing date. The traditional media coverage on the filing day appears to attract the attention of retail investors and leads to further price changes in the direction of the pre-filing day price change. Institutional investors exploit this price pressure via opportunistic liquidity provision. Overall, our evidence suggests that the Form 8-K filing may have little direct informational benefit, particularly to retail investors. JEL Classifications: D8; G1; G2; M4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 created pressure for firms to take more visible and costly corrective action following the announcement of an earnings restatement. Building on theory about focusing events, the institutional effects of legislative change, and the agenda-setting role of the media, we propose that Sarbanes–Oxley created reactive normative pressure on firms that announce earnings restatements, increasing the likelihood of CEO replacement in their aftermath. We theorize that Sarbanes–Oxley changed the meaning—and therefore the impact—of media coverage of earnings restatements. Our findings show that firm behavior after Sarbanes–Oxley did change in ways that are consistent with the intent of the legislation: to increase executives' accountability for the reliability of their firms' financial statements. Moreover, we show this change is a result both of the direct effect of the legislation on increasing CEO accountability as well as through intensifying the effect of the media spotlight on misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We read all news items that came out between 1996 and 2000 on 458 Internet initial public offerings (IPOs) and a matching sample of 458 non-Internet IPOs (a total of 171,488 news items) and classify each news item as good news, neutral news, or bad news. We first document that the media were more positive for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic rise in share prices and more negative for Internet IPOs in the period of the dramatic fall in share prices. We then document that media hype is unable to explain the Internet bubble: A 1,646% difference exists in returns between Internet stocks and non-Internet stocks from January 1, 1997, through March 24, 2000 (the market peak), and the media can explain only 2.9% of that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the impact of the press on the behavior of various economic agents by examining how media exposure of board ineffectiveness affects corporate governance, investor trading behavior, and security prices. Our focus on board quality is motivated by the strong media criticism to which corporate boards and corporate America, in general, have been recently subjected. The results indicate that media releases of (noisy) information have significant economic consequences. In particular, media exposure of board ineffectiveness forces the targeted agents to take corrective actions and enhances shareholder wealth. Individual investors appear to react negatively to the media exposure, whereas investment firms act as if they anticipate the targeted firms' corrective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of media coverage on corporate governance by focusing on Russia in the period 1999 to 2002. We find that an investment fund's lobbying increases coverage of corporate governance violations in the Anglo-American press. We also find that coverage in the Anglo-American press increases the probability that a corporate governance violation is reversed. This effect is present even when we instrument coverage with an exogenous determinant, the fund's portfolio composition at the beginning of the period. The fund's strategy seems to work in part by impacting Russian companies' reputation abroad and in part by forcing regulators into action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether a simple quantitative measure of language can be used to predict individual firms' accounting earnings and stock returns. Our three main findings are: (1) the fraction of negative words in firm-specific news stories forecasts low firm earnings; (2) firms' stock prices briefly underreact to the information embedded in negative words; and (3) the earnings and return predictability from negative words is largest for the stories that focus on fundamentals. Together these findings suggest that linguistic media content captures otherwise hard-to-quantify aspects of firms' fundamentals, which investors quickly incorporate into stock prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effects of analysts' celebrity on investor reaction to earnings forecast revisions. We measure celebrity as the quantity of media coverage analysts receive in sources included in the Dow Jones Interactive database, and find that media coverage is positively related to investor reaction to forecast revisions. The effect of celebrity on the reaction to forecast revisions remains significant after controlling for forecast performance variables examined in prior studies (ex post forecast accuracy, ex ante accuracy, award status, and other variables shown to be related to forecast accuracy). While these results are consistent with the familiarity of the analyst's name affecting the market reaction, we cannot rule out that our measure of celebrity is correlated with error in the performance measures we examine and/or correlated with other unexamined dimensions of forecast performance. A content analysis of a random subsample of the media coverage of our sample analysts suggests that our findings likely are not due to the increased availability of forecast revisions. Finally, an investigation of the excess returns around the quarterly earnings announcement date suggests that market participants react too strongly to forecast revisions issued by analysts with high levels of media coverage. Taken together, these findings suggest that an analyst's level of media coverage can affect the initial market reaction to his forecast revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research suggests that the media plays an important information intermediary role in capital markets. We investigate the role of the media in influencing firms' engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Using a large sample of 4396 unique firms from 42 countries over the period 2003-2012, we find strong evidence that firms engage in more CSR activities if located in countries where the media has more freedom. This relation is robust to using various proxies for media freedom, an alternative source of CSR data, and to applying the instrumental variables approach to address endogeneity. In additional analyses, we find that the positive relation between media freedom and CSR engagement is stronger for better governed firms and for larger firms. Since the media have the ability to impact reputational capital, we conclude that media freedom affects firms' incentives to engage in costly CSR activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose that consumer's relationships to nonadvertising forms of mass media are an essential aspect of the perceived meanings they derive from advertisements. After presenting a multidisciplinary theoretical frame-work, we discuss the results of an in-depth grounded theory investigation that identifies three key interpretive relationships between consumers and mass media vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms compete for reputational status in institutional fields. Managers attempt to influence other stakeholders' assessments by signaling firms' salient advantages. Stakeholders gauge firms' relative merits by interpreting ambiguous informational signals from the firms, the media, and other monitors. The results of an empirical study of 292 large U.S. firms supported the general hypothesis that publics construct reputations on the basis of information about firms' relative structural positions within organizational fields, specifically using market and accounting signals indicating performance, institutional signals indicating conformity to social norms, and strategy signals indicating strategic postures. Understanding the informational medium from which publics construct reputations helps explain sources of mobility barriers within industries that originate in external perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few issues have caused as much concern among managers over the last decade as business-press relations. The quality of a company's relationship with the media can have a decisive impact on its profitability. This article offers a number of practical suggestions for managers to assist them in improving the effectiveness of their own communications with the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business has long been affected adversely by public misinformation. In this article, the author surveys the opinions of various business leaders and media representatives regarding the treatment of business in the media and proposes establishment of a National Council of Public Information. This council would be supported by business and industry and would receive donations of advertising space and air time from the media, to assure comprehensive coverage of business topics and points of view that are not represented in other media outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to an advertising or sales message after it has been received by the consumer? Findings from a number of studies are reviewed in this article to show that sales messages have a considerable chance of being blocked, modified, or of having no direct motivating effect. Some significant elements of the communication process and forces operating to block mass media messages are explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass media research must provide decision makers with the most relevant information available, and must provide it accurately. It does not always do so. This article features the intensive interview, extended piloting and the intensive backtracking interview as techniques for assessing the relevance and the accuracy of media, measures currently in use and for developing more efficient alternatives where this is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marketing executives and mathematicians have joined forces in a search for improved decision models to handle such problems as new-product development, media selection, retail inventory control, and size of sales force. The author of this article explains and illustrates those operations research models which hold the greatest promise in the marketing area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it the highest mission of marketers to switch buyers to their particular brand? Or to induce people to buy and consume more and still more goods? The author of this article wonders: How useful is this mission? To how much respect does it entitle marketers? Are they anxious enough for social approval to assume more social responsibility? The writer likens marketing to an "adolescent giant"--anxious for approval, but torn between selfishness, materialism, and altruism. But he believes that marketing will mature into a more helpful, effective, and respected member of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are advertising appropriations, as related to share of national income, at an all-time high? Most advertising men say "yes" without hesitation. But this is not true, as a distinguished business historian demonstrates in this article. Actually advertising's current share of national income is lower than in any decade from the 1890's through the 1930's. The author points out that this phenomenon is related to the fact that advertising expenditures in constant dollars go farther than thirty years ago. In fact, they result in 2½ times greater per capita exposure to advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholars have studied “urban bias” in public policy, the potential for bias in the private provision of public goods has received little attention. Private certification is a mechanism encouraging private provision of environmental public goods. We show that within countries, there are often wide disparities in certification rates between firms located in urban and non-urban areas. However, these disparities can be mitigated if there is a countervailing force: scrutiny of firms' practices by key stakeholders. We suggest that the presence of strong civil society, independent media, a functioning state regulatory apparatus, and multinational owners can ameliorate the urban bias in certification uptakes. We test this argument with global, firm-level data covering over 40,000 firms in ninety-three countries. Our analyses suggest that an urban bias is mitigated when stakeholders—both public and private—have the freedom and capacity to scrutinize firms' activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social media has grown explosively and became outstanding in recent years. Organizations, public or private, have realized the importance of social media as a powerful tool for establishing relationships with citizens or consumers. Increasingly, organizations want to hire some professionals as an attempt to manage and utilize social media effectively for their businesses or projects. Universities need to prepare a curriculum for students who want these jobs. As a consequence, this study aims to determine to what extent social media education in UAE universities, is efficient in fulfilling the needs of modern public relations industry in UAE. It includes 40 participants; 20 PR professionals from various industries across the UAE and the other 20 are faculty members from five universities in the UAE, using purposive sampling. In addition, the researcher conducted a qualitative content analysis of Social Media related courses syllabi in five universities in the UAE. The researcher used "Experiential Learning" theory to support the theoretical aspect of the current study. The most important results: - The overall survey results indicated a clear consensus among educators and practitioners of the existence of a gap between PR academia and PR industry. - The overall survey results indicated a clear consensus among educators and practitioners about the degree of importance of knowledge components. - However, the views and opinions of public relations educators and practitioners differed on the skills that should be taught and their degree of importance. - Comparing the results of the surveys to the content analysis, it showed that no much consensus among the two groups' views and what is being taught now in PR curriculums exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research summary: This article explores the relationship between corporate social irresponsibility ( CSI) and financial risk. We posit that media coverage of CSI generates risk by providing conditions that increase the potential for stakeholder sanctions. Through analyzing an international panel of 539 firms during 2008-2013, we find that firms receiving higher CSI coverage face higher financial risk. We show that the reach of the reporting media outlet is a critical condition for this relationship. Once the outlet has a high reach, the severity of CSI coverage is a boundary condition that further reinforces the effect. Our findings complement existing theory about the risk-mitigating effect of corporate social responsibility by illuminating the risk-generating effect of CSI coverage. For executives, these insights suggest complementary strategies for corporate risk management. Managerial summary: This article examines the effect of negative news on financial risk. It shows that negative media articles regarding environmental, social, and governance ( ESG) issues increase a firm's credit risk. It also provides a detailed analysis of the impact of an article's reach and severity, i.e., how many readers are exposed to the article and how harshly it criticizes the firm. The results allow to quantitatively assess the risk that emanates from negative ESG news. For executives, three strategies are derived for limiting a firm's exposure to this risk: balancing corporate social responsibility programs with operational safety programs, reporting suboptimal environmental and social performance transparently and proactively, and avoiding acquisition targets and markets with a legacy of negative news. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most Western countries, where direct advertising of prescription drugs (DTCA) is banned, the pharma industry relies primarily on PR activities to promote its products. Despite the pharma industry's ever-increasing share in framing media coverage of health issues, the strategies used in its press materials have not yet been systematically examined. This study uses framing theory to explore the PR strategies and tactics employed by pharmaceutical companies to promote their products in Israel, where DTCA is banned. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, we examined 1548 pharmaceutical press releases. The Israeli example can serve as a case study for understanding how the pharma industry operates in many countries around the world where DTCA is banned. Our findings show that strategies and tactics dubbed as “disease mongering” dominate the pharma industry’s press releases. The four main strategies identified in this study are third party technique, disease branding, drug branding and Astroturfing. Some of the common PR strategies and tactics we found are not only unethical, but also opposed to the regulatory bodies in Israel, and would never receive approval, even in countries where DTCA is allowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is designed to broaden the understanding of South Korean newspapers' journalistic practices. It examines the editorial approaches of two contrasting sets of newspapers towards corruption accusations and judicial proceedings against a leading corporation, Samsung. Through an analysis of the degree to which the ideological leanings and economic interests of the newspapers are reflected in their editorials on this issue, it shows that the journalistic practices of South Korean newspapers have been mixed. In addressing to what extent the financial viability of newspapers influences their news reporting, this article shows that there is a complex interplay of ideological inclination and economic interests in their reporting on economic corruption. It argues that the watchdog role performed by the newspapers, conservative newspapers in particular, in relation to the powerful economic and corporate actors represented by business conglomerates, has to a large extent been subordinated to the papers' organizational and economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines the development of programmatic technology and how it can now be used to reach consumers at every point of the purchase funnel. It will explain how success requires a radical change to traditional media planning starting from the consumer rather than affinity, reach or historical performance. Making this a reality requires marketers to understand the programmatic system; and this paper also identifies the essential terms and explains them in a way that will help brands interrogate the landscape and develop the right solutions for their company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of media platforms and the general decline of television viewership, marketers must reallocate investments into high-impact touchpoints.This paper explores how brands can shift spending to new creative vehicles while still optimising programmes with proven success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses relationships between mass media orientations of communication professionals in organisations and their external communication strategies. We assume that mass media orientations within an organisation may affect an organisation’s external communication strategies of bridging and buffering. A survey among 150 Dutch communication professionals working for both for-profit and public organisations as well as NPOs was conducted. Our study shows that preferences for specific communication strategies are related to different forms of media orientation. Having media attention as an organisational goal is more strongly associated with buffering, that is, one-way and symmetric communication, yet a more negative attitude toward the media also hinders an organisation from bridging activities. Overall, few differences between the three types of organisations regarding communication strategies and media orientations were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequences of individual words make up media reports. And sequences of media reports constitute the power of the news media to influence corporate practices. In this paper, we focus on the micro-foundations of news reports to elaborate how an atmosphere of negative news reports following an initial exposure of corporate pollution activity can help stop such activity through their impact on corporate managers. We extend our understanding of the corporate governance effect of news media by considering two new aspects of reports-one, the proportion of words in negative reports relative to the total number of words in all reports; and two, the geographical origin of news media. We suggest that the more negative the media coverage, and the more local this coverage, the greater the impact on corporations. Our study of news media reports from more than 600 newspaper sources on disciplining pollution activities of listed Chinese firms from 2004 to 2012 provides strong support for our hypotheses. These findings have valuable implications for the handling of pollution issues in transitional economies via the power of news words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]