(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
efficiency of public sidewalk characters declined drastically if too much burden is placed
upon them.
She argued a network required three requisites to prosper: a start of some kind, a physical
area which sufficient people can identify as users, and like Bourdieu, it requires time. Jacobs’
idea of public characters bears strong similarity to the regional newspaper network, where
public characters can be considered both journalists and their sources of news. A focus of my
wider research project will be to consider what happens to social capital if difficulties and
burdens are placed on those who disseminate news and information within these networks.
I have deliberately referred to regional newspapers as networks throughout this paper as
networks are considered by all four founding theorists on social capital as an essential
element of social capital theory.
Network theorist Ronald Burt (Burt 1992) devised the ‘structural hole’ theory of social
capital as it applies to organisations, which is a valuable tool for understanding the
production and dissemination of news and information in the regional newspaper
environment. He expands on Granovetter’s weak ties concept ((Granovetter 1973) to argue
that information brokers (individual or organisations) acquire social capital by feeding off
weak ties or structural holes between clusters of people for their own gain (Burt 1992). While
bridging has been connected to information channels, there is little evidence to suggest that
Burt’s theory has not been linked to the media industry. The structural hole argument defines
social capital in terms of the information and control advantages of being the broker between
people otherwise disconnected in social structure (Burt 1997, p. 340). The structural hole is
an opportunity to broker the flow of information between people and control the form of
projects that bring together people from all sides of the hole. (p341)
Importantly, Burt argues a structural hole between two clusters in a network does not mean
that people in the two clusters are unaware of each other. It simply means that they are so
focused on their own activities that they have little time to attend to the activities of people in
the other cluster. (Burt 2001). This is similar to Jacobs’ observation of the NYC sidewalk
‘broker’ or public character who brings people together whom which “a certain degree of
contact is useful or enjoyable, but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want
you in theirs either”(Jacobs 1961, p. 67).
Burt says a structural hole indicates that the people on either side of the hole circulate in
different flows of information. (p341). He argues brokers are in a position to bring together
otherwise disconnected contacts, which gives them disproportionate say in whose interests
are served when the contacts come together. The power to control information corresponds to
terms used in media research such as gatekeeping (White, 1950) and agenda setting theory
(McCombs & Shaw, 1972) which aim to make correlations between what a newspaper
considers newsworthy and how it is presented from story structure to placement, design and
layout. Further, the broker’s power to control information by connecting structural holes can
be for the public good for example where the media takes an advocacy role using the
collective capital of the network (Bourdieu 1986) and which may depend on coupling
bonding/bridging/linking forms of social capital (Woolcock, M 2001). For example,
Australia’s earliest newspapers have a tradition of community advocacy. Rod Kirpatrick
argues, regional newspapers began “not merely as commercial ventures but because
businessmen, residents and journalists perceived that their towns had interests separate from
other settlements, particularly those that were bigger or seemed to be developing as rivals for
such facilities as ports, railways or roads” (Kirkpatrick 1984).
429