How organisations framed the 2009 H1N1 pandemic via social and traditional media - 5 views
started by Jannicke Rye on 25 Mar 12
started by Jannicke Rye on 25 Mar 12
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This article evaluates how 13 organisations addressed the challenge when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the first global flu epidemic in 41 years in 2009. It states that, at first, the media extensively covered the outbreak with 60 articles published in the New York Times during the first two weeks of the crisis, but weeks into the crisis both media and public attention subsided.
The article suggests that actively incorporating new media into crisis responses has tangible benefits for organizations, and that it is necessary for organisations to incorporate social media into their issues management. Organisations can enhance their relationship with key publics during crises, through fostering emotional support.
According to the article crisis communication scholars have identified a wide range of emotions organisations can incorporate into their crisis responses depending upon the crisis situations: alert, anger, confusion, relief, sadness, shame. However, researches have not explored how these emotions are employed differently via traditional and social media.
The study found significant differences between organisations representing government and corporate interests in responding to the pandemic flu. Regarding media channels used for distributing crisis responses, about 28% of the crisis responses were distributed via traditional media, while 72% were distributed via social media.
The findings in the article provided several insights for future studies, and stated that more research is needed to examine crises to help communicators determine how to adapt their response strategies and tactics over time.
I found this article interesting, because it focused on how organisations communicate with people, and implement the use of both traditional and social media to inform people about what is going on. In one way I could relate to what the article was talking about, because when the massacre happened in Norway I noticed how broadly it was covered, with both traditional media and social media being full of information about every detail from that day. But now there is hardly anything published about it, which is similar to the covering of the flu.