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This paper posits journalists as cartographers who, through their reporting, produce a news geography which maps the world and sketches the contours and connections of their communities within that world. Employing a methodology adapted to the analysis of newspaper sites on the World Wide Web, this paper reports on an intensive news-flow study of the on-line editions of Canada's three national newspapers - the Globe and Mail, the National Post and Le Devoir - to determine whether these newspapers are taking advantage of the Internet's technological capacity to expand their news geographies beyond conventional borders. We argue that not only do these newspapers portray a highly circumscribed world, but they fail to exploit fully even the national space of Canada, thus reinforcing the conventional news value of proximity - physical, cultural or emotional closeness - as a strongly determinant factor in mapping their news worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the manner through which the International Hockey League (IHL) and its operations were portrayed in newspaper coverage in the larger urban centers of eastern Canada, where hockey had its developmental and organizational roots within the middle- and upper-middle-class community, and compares it to coverage that appeared in newspapers in the communities that hosted IHL teams, which were communities driven by industry and had large working-class populations. To do so, a comparison of newspaper coverage of the IHL in local IHL newspapers with reports published in newspapers in major Canadian cities strongly associated with the origins, development, and organizational control of ice hockey, is undertaken. The development of the sport of ice hockey in both Canada and the USA, and newspaper coverage generally, and hockey specifically, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reviewed. Representative examples of the coverage of IHL games and operations over the course of its three-year operations are then provided. Having compared the coverage of games and operations of the IHL between IHL and Canadian-based newspapers, the paper concludes with a discussion of how business competition, competing ideologies toward high-level sport, and class-based perceptions regarding violence, aggression, and masculinity can affect the newspaper coverage of sporting events.

International news-flow research has repeatedly identified significant imbalances in the global exchange of news among regions of the world. With the emergence of thousands of news sites on the World Wide Web, and the corresponding ability of news audiences to access these sites, the Internet offers the technological capacity to globalize media content. This paper seeks to test that possibility by exploring the way one Canadian daily newspaper, the Montreal Gazette , occupies the geography of the Internet with its on-line news operation. The paper reports on an exploratory comparative news-flow study of the Gazette 's hard-copy and on-line editions to determine whether on-line publishing has prompted the Gazette to alter the boundaries of its news coverage. While the paper concludes that, indeed, the Gazette 's website consistently carried far more international news items than its hard-copy edition, it also notes that this distinction is largely explained by the website's very heavy reliance on wire-service copy and its emphasis on sports news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchical model of influences on media content, this paper summarizes content analyses by NewsWatch Canada on different dimensions of potential corporate influence on Canadian newspaper content: (1) the offsetting tendencies of content rationalization and duplication in chain papers; (2) newspaper coverage of their own parent companies, and of the media industry; (3) the influence of newspaper editorial positions on news coverage; (4) some potential impacts of advertising; (5) potential double standards related to politics and social class. While the research is exploratory, there is evidence of systemic corporate influence, particularly on the second, third and fifth dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is a research project in the social sciences and humanities in Canada that involves seven universities and partnerships with several public- and private-sector institutions. The goal of the project is to create a research infrastructure centered oil microdata from the 1911-1951 decennial Canadian censuses, accompanied by metadata and extensive contextual data. The result will provide a new foundation for the study of change in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. This paper will describe the research infrastructure that is being created, and explain how the CCRI defines metadata and contextual data, and why it is of interest to social science researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges Lefebvre's distinction between Representations of Space and Spaces of Representation. Most current work in this area has assumed modernist conceptions of power, thereby interpreting representations of space (conceived space) as the property of the powerful who alone possess the ability to abstract space for their particular ends. Contrary to Lefebvre, I suggest that representation and abstraction are not the agents of state capitalism alone but are also manifested in 'counter' discourses. As an example of a 'counter discourse' I draw upon a series of editorial articles written in a local gay-oriented newspaper about a gay enclave in Vancouver, Canada. I argue that these depictions cloud the distinctions as practised between conception, abstraction and the imaginary in urban space. They also serve to promote one interpretation of space above others, and in that sense they colonize the experience of everyday life in their own way. The act of 'speaking for' presupposes a certain power, and in these cases, highlights the fact that the power of representation and abstraction does not only occur at the state or 'system' level. I suggest that by overcoming the assumption of a zero-sum ontology of power, one can see how a variety of agents in the urban context engage in the attempt to carve out their 'own' spaces of stability in the urban social imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National and regional consciousness are central to contemporary political cleavages in Canada. The Canadian press presents divergent viewpoints on federalism and the future of Canada and Quebec. This study examines the linkage between types of newspapers read by Canadians and readers' feelings toward Quebec and Canada. Data are individual responses from the 1993 Canadian Election Study. The analysis reveals that consumers of French-language newspapers have significantly more positive feelings toward the province of Quebec and more negative assessments of the nation of Canada. Readers of (English-language) nationally oriented papers, however, have more favorable views of Quebec than other Canadians. This research adds to the literature on the effects of mass media on individuals' political and social attitudes and the formation of beliefs in the Canadian polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]