Does Personal Experience in a Community Increase or Decrease Newspaper Reading?

Abstract

Many agenda-setting researchers argue that personal experience with issues or events in a community diminishes use of mass media. This study challenges this notion and, drawing on the community attachment model, hypothesizes that personal experience normally will increase newspaper reading. Personal experience increases reading because rarely is it identical or isomorphic with news coverage, especially in pluralistic systems, and because, like social ties in general, personal experience often stimulates additional needs for information. Data support the key hypothesis when it comes to reading of the local community weekly and student newspapers, but not for the metropolitan newspaper.