Trend Watching, How the Media Create Trends and How to be the First to Uncover Them

This Informative Book is about Trend Watching. How the Media Creates Trends and How you can be the First to Uncover Them

This book illustrates how content analysis might be used to identify the emergence of significant trends. The method is based on Merriam's National Media Index , which integrates a cross section of network and national print media into a kind of "power index." The driving assumption of the book is that trends cannot be vitalized unless the major media imbue them into the "public memory"a debatable point. The all-important public memory can be influenced by small, repeated doses of information, or by megadoses in compressed periods of time. The book's approach to capturing all this is rather mechanistic, largely ignoring the more critical and subjective issue of pattern recognition. Small organizations will find the system too cumbersome; large organizations are better off subscribing to Merriam's Index .Gene R. Laczniak, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.