eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

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Objectives of the study

The objective of the study was to investigate the communication with the media of a particular process, the Baltic Sea Action Summit (BSAS), in a public-private partnership context. This type of partnership in environmental protection and an investigation of its media communication processes, offer new information about the characteristics of such collaboration. First, the main messages communicated to the media about the BSAS were identified. Second, the identified messages were compared to a sample of news articles and it was investigated whether the messages were published. Third, an evaluation using the findings and previous literature was conducted to determine whether the communication to the media about the BSAS process was successful.

Methodology

This study was conducted with a qualitative approach. The main data were semi-structured interviews and a sample of news articles about the BSAS. The interviewees were involved in the communication with the media and represented the different organizations involved in the BSAS process. The news article sample was gathered from international news publications. Although the main method of research in this study was qualitative, some characteristics of quantitative methods were used during the analysis of the articles. The interviews and articles were mainly analyzed using content analysis.

Results of the Study

The results and main findings of the study indicate that the overall communication to the media about the BSAS process can be described as successful. First, the main findings suggest that the different communicators had similar messages that were communicated to the media but there was also variation. However, there were quite many messages that were identified from the interviews. This suggests that the messages were not as focused as perhaps would have been intended. Second, the comparison of the identified core and significant messages to the sample news articles revealed that the core messages did indeed appear in the sample articles. In other words, the majority of the most important messages were published. An analysis of the core and significant messages using news values revealed that a message that could be associated with several news values was more likely to be published in the sample articles.