Research Note—Tigerblood: Newspapers, Blogs, and the Founding of Information Technology Firms

Abstract

In this paper, we study the impact of increases in media coverage from two sources, newspapers and blogs, on firm founding rates in the context of technology-based entrepreneurship. Although increasing work in information systems (IS) has begun to investigate the effect of user-generated content on entrepreneurial behavior, limited attention has been devoted to how media affects firm founding or the boundary conditions of such an effect. Arguing for the direct effect of increased discourse in traditional and user-generated media in the information technology (IT) industry, results suggest that discourse in traditional media and blogs strongly influences IT firm founding rates. We further consider the differential impacts of media discourse on firm founding in different IT subsectors, over time, and in different locations. We test our hypotheses using entrepreneurial firm founding data from VentureXpert from 1998 to 2007, social media data from the three largest blogging platforms, and traditional media coverage from 11 major U.S. newspapers. Our work contributes to a better understanding of the concurrent effects of multiple forms of media on decision making and adds to the small but emerging literature addressing entrepreneurship-related research questions in IS.