The integration between mainstream and digital media is renewing the contemporary media ecosystem, questioning traditional agenda setting and building of public attention processes.
This Paper aims to inquire the mutual interaction processes among different media environments, actors, and topics that can play a more or less decisive role in the building of public agenda.
The research goals of this Paper are:
1) to describe public agenda building at the national and transnational level, assuming that:
a) such process originates from traditional media and then moves into the social media environment;
b) a reverse process may exist, allowing for conversation inside the sphere of social media to bring public attention to specific issues. The nature of the issue and, particularly, its intrinsic appeal for the public opinion is a decisive factor in this respect.
2) to analyse the mutual influence between traditional and social media in order to understand when specific issues become a successful point of debate in the public agenda, and to investigate the direction of this process.
The Paper will then focus on the transnationalisation of problems in the context of networked agendas by considering the case of the 2016 Italian Constitutional Referendum, an event that has obviously catalysed the national public debate but also raised attention and worries in other European arenas. Two dimensions will be explored. First, the positions of foreign actors (like the Financial Times and the Economist) about the Referendum will be analysed by studying the debate in Italian traditional and digital news media, and by exploring citizens' reactions in the social networks. Then, the focus will be moved directly to the European scenery by studying the way in which traditional media and social networks of foreign countries developed the debate on what used to be a typically domestic issue.
