Short- and Long-Term Campaign Effects on News Stories' Semantic Networks: Priming or Framing?

This longitudinal study of a long-term a public relations campaign over a 13-year period investigates whether it has had priming or framing effects on newspaper reporters. The "Great Cities Initiative," launched by a university in the Chicago media market, was the basis for a naturalistic quasi-experiment. The phrase "great cities" in the Chicago Tribune increased from 15 pretest occurrences to 65 during the posttest. Nevertheless, only 17 occurrences were in stories identifying the campaign source. Semantic network diversity increased. Evidence favored semantic priming over framing effects. This indicates that the public relations campaign did not result in as many articles that were consistent with campaign framing as articles that dealt with unrelated aspects of the concept "great cities." To examine longer term changes in priming effects, a series of 16-month periods from the primary post-test period forward until February 14, 2007 was analyzed for the number of stories containing "great cities." The slope of the line it shows that the initial increase in "great cities" use during the immediate post-campaign launch period continued to rise through 32 months after the launch, after which the trend is downward. The university continued its communication about the "Great Cities Initiative" throughout this period and continues to do so. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]