New Medias Agenda: Approaches to Research Methods
The article presents the author’s method of a complex study of new media’s agenda based on the qualitative and quantitative content analysis. The topicality of the work is explained by the need for new theoretical and empirical approaches to studying the process of setting the agenda of social media and messengers, which has been influenced by manifold expansion of the media-political field, emergence of new agents, and changes in the focus works. The author adapts the theory of agenda setting to the current environment of new media, focusing on identification of agenda topics among the diversity of all social media content. The article describes a three-stage procedure of content selection that involves both automatic and hand sorting of publications. The selection factors include the content of publications and the amount of public attention to them, depending on the purpose of the media-platform. The author demonstrates the tools of the analysis, and comments on the peculiarities of working with various analytical services to study new media. The method was tested within the research into the agenda of five new media platforms (Facebook, Vkontakte, Twitter, Livejournal, Telegram) in the period of 5–11 March, 2020. The topics most referred to were common for various media. The new media’s agenda, which was reconstructed by the author’s method, matches 60 % of the agenda of the traditional media in the same period. However, in half of the cases, the match in the topics did not mean their discussion in social media. Instead, the topics were in the focus of public attention only in the form of jokes, caricatures, or anecdotes. Due to the complexity of the study object, the methodological problems of the research require a further consideration aimed at developing new methods and improving the tools of the analysis.