Media Coverage of US Wind Power Plants: Does it Generate Electricity?

This paper focuses on how media coverage influences innovation adoption. Specifically, we examine the effects of news media: (1) attention, (2) tenor (or affective content), (3) diversity of issues and (4) specific content areas on the likelihood and speed of adoption of wind power plants in the US. The theory developed in this paper suggests that news media both affects and reflects the cognitive appraisals of various primary stakeholders as they seek to make sense of the value of a proposed innovation. We add to the nascent infomediaries research literature in four important ways: providing additional empirical evidence for decreasing returns to media attention, examining the effect of specific content areas, providing further empirical evidence of the importance of tenor alone and in interaction with content, and demonstrating the effect of media on a new dependent variable not previously studied in media effects on market outcomes research. This study adds to the innovation literature by highlighting an important non-market actor, the media, on the diffusion of innovations, and to the managerial and organizational cognition literature by suggesting that affective content (emotions) and specific aspects of content (cognition) on the part of third party infomediaries is associated with innovation diffusion.