Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility in Singapore: Toward More Effective Media Relations

Organizations face several impediments when it comes to communicating their corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement to the public via the media. This paper examines practitioners’ and journalists’ perception of CSR communication using the agenda- building model (Qiu Q, Cameron GT, Communicating health disparities: Building a supportive media agenda. VDM Verlag, Saarbruecken, 2008) by examining news coverage of how practitioners and journalists understand CSR, what types of CSR stories get covered in the media, and how are CSR stories portrayed in the media. News coverage of Singapore’s mainstream publications, The Straits Times, The Business Times, and The New Paper, were analyzed. The constructed week method was used and two constructed weeks (14 days) were randomly picked to enable a representative sample of a year’s worth of news articles (Riffe D, Aust CF, Lacy SR, J Q 70(4):133–139, 1993). Media coverage of CSR engagement was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis will allow us to compare the perceptions of CSR held by PR practitioners and journalists and actual media coverage. Findings suggested differences in perceptions of what makes news between practitioners and journalists. This is a reflection of the fundamental and larger issue of what each set of professionals regard as news: Practitioners view news as advancing their organizational interests, while journalists regard news through newsworthiness lens. How can that schism be bridged? A framework of media relations is proposed based on Pang’s (Corp Commun Int J 15(2):192–204, 2010) Mediating the Media model.