It's a Matter of Timing. How Politicians' Strategic Timing Can Affect What Becomes News

Political decisions are more and more made with the press in mind. Politicians’ communication efforts are increasingly professionalized and ever more resources go to news management. Accordingly, there is growing scholarly attention for the mediatization of politics and the adaptation of politicians to the news media logic. Yet, this stream of literature has remained largely theoretical. Few studies investigate the activities by which politicians try to shape media coverage. Furthermore, studies examining politicians’ media work are almost exclusively about ‘what’ the content of the messages is and ‘how’ these are sent. ‘When’ the messages are communicated is mostly neglected. The timing of a message, however, is a crucial factor to explain whether political messages are covered in the news. What is picked up by journalists is highly dependent on media dynamics at a certain moment. Moreover, timing strategies are gaining relevance because of the 24-hour news cycle and the advent of news websites and social media. This paper constructs a theory on strategic timing and empirically analyzes whether timing strategies are an effective tool for politicians to gain media coverage. I discern three types of strategic timing. Firstly, I look at news cycles. Media access for messages varies because of time-bound journalistic and political routines like deadlines, working days, and holidays. Do messages that are sent at a certain moment (hour of the day, day of the week, time of the year) gain more media attention than others? Second, whether a message is picked up by journalists depends on the dynamics of the media agenda—i.e. whether the media agenda is congested or not. At some days journalists are actively searching for something to write, while at others days there is more than enough to fill multiple newspapers. During a media hype, for instance, it is less likely that a politician’s message gets picked up than when the media agenda is less packed. Hence, I test to what extent the success of a message depends on the congestion of the media agenda. Third, whether items are picked up by the news media can be expected to be strongly influenced by events. Journalists select messages they think will resonate with the public and which seem to be the most important at a certain moment—what is newsworthy today? Politicians therefore can try to align their communication with particular planned events, such as International Women’s Day or the first day of school. Does this strategy increase the chance that these messages get media coverage? The data for this paper consist of three types of politicians’ media input (press releases, press events and tweets) and three types of media output (press agency articles, newspaper articles and online news) of more than 200 Belgian (Flemish) politicians, collected between June and December 2017. Via automated content analysis and by using cheating detection software, I analyze to what extent politicians’ attempts to gain media attention are successful and whether their success can be explained by the timing of the messages.