Who drives a crisis? The diffusion of an issue through social networks

•Investigating a total of 5787 reports from multiple media including Twitter.•Tweets and postings in online communities drove diffusion of a corporate crisis.•Online personal media took a leading role in setting agendas of the crisis evolution.•Four stages of crisis were identified and they had different agendas.•Traditional media reported each issue latest as following online media.

Digital convergence has permeated the media environment. Social network services such as Twitter and blogs have dramatically changed how people collect and process information. The purpose of this study is to use content analysis to investigate the inter-media agenda-setting relationship among different media regarding a crisis. The findings support the inter-media agenda-setting effects in various dimensions, with Twitter being the leading outlet of crisis-related reports in terms of volume and content.