The Exploring Media’s Impact on Financial Journalism

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because they delimit and change the opportunities for financial journalists to bring genuinely

new information to the financial market.

The impacts of the digitalization and the democratision of the internet therefore also require the

attention of accounting and finance research on market efficiency and price discovery into

financial news mediaandits effect on capital markets. This thesis therefore explores how the

modern financial information environment, particularly the rise of PR and computerisation

affect traditional forms of financial journalism and corporate disclosure.

Until recently, financial news media in its traditional and emerging forms has largely been

ignored as a serious object of study in the accounting and finance literature. However, the

developments highlighted above have seen the media begin to catch the attention of accounting

and finance academics in the past five years or so, and an emerging research programme

assessing the role of journalists as financial information intermediaries is being established.

For example, some of the seminal papers in this area have built on the media’s well-known role

in media theory for maintaining democracy in its role of the “fourth estate” (Curran, 2011). This

role has been applied by some accounting and finance researchers to explore the media’s role in

corporate governance, such as: Dyck Volchkova, and Zingales 2006); Miller (2006); Borden

(2007); and Dai et al (2013). Others have explored the media’s role in ameliorating information

asymmetry as information intermediaries such as Chan (2003) and Bushee, Core, Guay and

Hamm (2010). Some have contributed findings in relation to the directional causality of the

media’s information intermediation function such as Dougal (2012) who use linear regression to

test the effects of individual Wall Street Journal columnists on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and

find the journalists’ fixed characteristics to be a significant predictor of future Dow Jones Industrial

Average returns up to 40%.

However, all the research to date has found, with quantitative analysis, that the media has an

overall negative effect on returns and a positive effect on volumes (See Fang and Peress (2009);

Tetlock (2007) and (2010). While some of these studies vary across countries, firm-size and

some use more than one information source, only one paper, Taffler and Ryan (2004), in the

literature has categorized a pluralistic universe of information intermediaries in the firm’s

environment and considered how they act in concert but this has been done ex post and not a

priori. This is a gap in the research for a more pluralistic categorization of information

intermediaries will facilitate a more comprehensivetypology of these actors, and in turn make

comparison and contrast more meaningful.

None of the accounting and finance studies have explored their intuitions for the observed

results using qualitative methods,or interviewing the journalists themselves about their

understandings of the work they do (for example, Solomon and Sosyura (2011) who provide

explanations based on secondary data). This is another gap in the prior research. This thesis

makes a contribution by exploring these gaps in the prior research, articulated explicitly below in

the research questions and accompanying contributions.

The financial information intermediation role of the media is also largely absent from the

sociology of the professions and the social studies of finance and accounting research. This

thesis hence makes a multidisciplinary contribution by including these literatures to increase

understanding of what financial journalists contribute to information intermediation in financial

markets and the areas of financial knowledge over which they claim jurisdiction in the orthodox

accounting and finance literature.

There are some seminal papers on the role of financial journalists in the market in the social

studies of accounting finance, such as Kennedy, 2007 who looks at how media coverage

facilitates the “counting” of firms by investors, and Clark, Thrift and Tickell (2004) who look at

how the media is performative2 in financial markets.

In the sociology of accounting and finance, Preda (2007) has looked at the case of financial

chartists through the lens of the sociology of professions in relation to the financial markets and

Abbott (1988) has looked at the information professions more generally in the sociology of

professions literature. This is though the first study, to my knowledge, to look at journalists and

PRs (as discussed below) through the lens of the sociology of professions in relation to the

2 To say that something is performative, is to say that it induces action, and does not merely describe something. (See MacKenzie,

2008 for example.

financial market. By looking at the sociology of professions, the claims of journalists and PR as

financial information intermediaries can be investigated particularly with regard to their

relationship to each other and claims to expertise in financial markets. The thesis makes a

contribution to the gap in this literature.

There is not much research onthe role of investor relations in financial information

intermediation, and virtually nothing on the role of financial public relations. However, some

seminal papers such as Marston (2001) and Bushee and Miller (2011) look at the role of IR in

increasing firm following, and a small emerging research cluster has looked at the role of press

releases (normally written by PR or IR about the firm) such as Greene et al (2011); Solomon

(2012); Ahern and Sosyura (2013); and Neuhierl et al (2013). This literature, which looks at

investor relations and press releases, has focused on the relationship of the firms with its

shareholders and financial analysts and is at times conflated with the voluntary disclosure

literature. This explains why the firms’ management of its relationship with its stakeholders

through reputation risk management or public relations is largely absent from the orthodox

accounting and finance literature. Corporate reputation risk management has been

acknowledged within the corporate social responsibility literature by Bebbington (2008) as have

press releases for impression management in the context of environmental reporting (Merkl-

Davies, 2013).

However, public relations has not been viewed from the perspective of information

intermediation and how the increase of CSR has subsumed investor relations into the public

relations function. Power (2004) asserts that reputation risk management represents an

opportunity for public relations firms to expand their activities into risk management

particularly in light of media’s amplification role of news events. This thesis hence makes a

contribution to looking at the importance of reputation risk management through public

relations as an important aspect of corporate valuation.

The thesis also contributes to the literature by doing this research through interviews with

public relations practitioners as well as considering the increasing jurisdiction of public relations

over activities of corporate reporting, information intermediation and reputation risk

management by drawing on the sociology of professions literature as one of its multidisciplinary

contributions in this regard.

None of the extant literatures have interviewed financial PRs or vigorously researched the

reputation risk management function from the perspective of its effects on corporate valuation.

This study also makes a further multidisciplinary contribution to the literature by looking at the

corporate reputation management and public relations literature. The intermediation role of

financial public relations is largely absent from the social studies of finance and accounting.

There is a small body of research in the literature on public relations that considers these actors

in the sociology of professions and in relation to financial markets (See Davis: 2002) but more

research is needed on this in accounting and finance research due to the increasing

pervasiveness of financial PR and the declining resources of financial journalism (See Doyle,

2006).

The influence of the changing topography of financial information due to high-speed financial

markets; bubble and crisis-prone financial markets and social media has been looked at in the

journalism literature Tambini (2009); Shiffrin (2010) and Kleinnejinhuis et al (2013). Economists

and accounting researchers such as Shiller (2000); Kindleberger and Aliber (2005); Bhattarcharya

et al (2009); and Stiglitz (2010) but not much is known about how this will change the role of

information intermediaries and the role this may have on corporate reputation. This is another

important and relevant gap in the literature to which the thesis makes a contribution.

In sum, when this research project began in 2008, there was hardly any research in this area, and

even though the growing importance of it was recognized, it was a persistent worry if the

research topic would find a home in the literature in those early days. Ironically, the financial

crisis and the growth of media platforms through the internet have brought into question the

manner in which we consider financial problems and there is now a rapidly growing strand of

literature in accounting and finance to which this thesis makes a contribution.

The sections which follow discuss the more specific research questions and the subsequent

empirical, methodological and theoretical contribution of the findings to subsequent empirical,

methodological and theoretical contributions in relation to this research question. This sets out

the research objectives of the thesis.

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