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For the 30 years between 1837 and 1867, the Gateshead Observer provided coverage of local and national business, financial and political news that rivalled and frequently surpassed that of the various Newcastle papers and was vastly superior to that of other north-eastern publications. This article examines how this came about. It also considers how a newspaper avowedly political in its foundation emerged, as a result of the particular circumstances of Gateshead's enfranchisement and industrial development and the individuals involved, essentially as a paper for the business community. This case study also reveals how the provincial press can shed light on an otherwise very much under-documented period of local business history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Edwardian era saw the final flowering of the partisan provincial press. In the decade before 1914, most of the major newspapers published outside London still displayed a clear party allegiance and collectively they outsold their London rivals. Some of the most important figures in the provincial press on the Liberal side were the cocoa manufacturer and philanthropist, Joseph Rowntree, and the associated trio, often known as the “Starmer group”, of Arnold Rowntree (Joseph's nephew), John Bowes Morrell (his business partner) and the newspaperman, Charles Starmer. Between them they rescued several important Liberal newspapers like the Northern Echo and Sheffield Independent for the party cause. But one of the group's lesser-known acquisitions, and its last before the First World War, was the Lincolnshire Chronicle in June 1914. This article argues that the Lincolnshire Chronicle 's purchase can best be seen as a purely commercial investment by the “Starmer group” and that this may indicate that the group was starting to become more interested in the press as a business, rather than as a political project. The article also examines how the layout and content of the Lincolnshire Chronicle were changed under its new owners in order to increase its profitability, often using methods pioneered elsewhere in the “Starmer group”, and resulting in a more standardised, “modern” format. In doing so, the article draws attention to the complexities of the interaction between power and profit in the Edwardian press and suggests the Lincolnshire Chronicle can be seen as a harbinger of the commercial, rather than political, future that lay before provincial newspaper groups in the post-First World War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article aims to raise a number of themes which will feature significantly through this special issue. The output of 19th-century journalists has been drawn upon extensively by historians in their exploration of political, social, economic and increasingly cultural areas of inquiry, both in urban and rural districts. However, in recent years, there has been relatively little attention paid to the provincial press itself. The article traces the development of the provincial press from the “scissors and paste” approach of the 18th century to the development of an increasingly locally orientated and politically partisan local press during the first half of the 19th century. Consideration will be paid to the perceived influence of the provincial press, the management and ownership of the provincial newspaper, and newspaper rivalries. It will be suggested that the heyday of the 19th-century provincial press can be located in the 30-year period after 1855. The impact of “new journalism” in the provincial press during the final years of the century will be briefly considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an analysis of news conventions used by 19th-century American newspapers, I show that the news of this time period took much the same form. Across geography, size of paper, and kind of paper (associational, commercial, partisan), newspapers shared the same conventions. I explain this uniformity in terms of James Carey's notion that the news expresses a form of public life. In this case, I argue that 19th-century news expressed a form of public life that was deeply imbued with values of association, affiliation, and partisanship. As newspapers expressed these values, they ritually reinforced a particular image of public life. I argue that this cultural approach to news conventions accounts for the available evidence in ways that may help the field move beyond functionalist explanations of news. In so doing, it opens new directions for understanding the relationship between news generally, and the public life in which it is situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of this paper examine key decision-making points in both the 1980–81 Janet Cooke fabrication case at the Washington Post and the deceptions of Jayson Blair at the New York Times that stretch from 1999 to 2003. These decisions are weighed against the commonly understood mission of journalism in general and the specifically stated missions at the Washington Post and the New York Times. The paper's working thesis is that if newspapers do not consistently measure their decisions and actions against their mission as a public trust, their commitment to truth can become shrouded by less noble motives like ambition and the thrill of a scoop. The authors argue that the prevailing organizational cultures at the Post and the Times failed to reinforce the newspapers’ main commitment at every level and thereby contributed to their blindness in both the Cooke and Blair cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does the local media, particularly the local press play, in the local constituency campaign during UK general elections? Drawing on interviews with MPs and candidates and evidence from a series of content analysis studies of local newspapers, this article reviews the extent to which the local press offers coverage to political actors during and outside the period of the election campaign. It argues that the pressure to court the local media and to build a local profile is rarely matched by extensive coverage and that this should raise questions about the place of the local press in the local constituency campaign. The paper also sets out the strategies used by MPs and candidates to court the local press and argues that this reflects the very limited role that the local press plays within the local constituency in respect of its political coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the media's influence on the Spanish–American War revises the revisionists through quantitative research. In this, the first study to accept Caudill's challenge to reconstruct historical public opinion through agenda-setting research, we do not find the yellow press started the war—as has been previously theorized and disproved—but we do find that sensational and conservative newspapers together created an enabling environment for going to war. We hope this study puts journalists’ impact on that major historical event in better perspective and leads to more efforts to use a wide range of quantitative research tools to understand history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A content analysis of opinion editorial (Op-Ed) articles published in the Washington Post and The New York Times between 1999 and 2003 was used to assess source and issue stand diversity on three salient issues. The study revealed that editors in both newspapers allowed only limited diversity in its source selection and issue stand on the discussion of gay marriages, affirmative action and the death penalty. The authors identify the lack of diversity as inconsistent with the original stated purpose of the Op-Ed as a forum for the articulation of diverse viewpoints on salient issues and call upon future studies to further examine diversity of sources and issue stands in Op-Ed pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the proposition that modern techniques of popular newspaper campaigning—on topical issues which are morally-charged but of indirect relevance to newspaper readerships—were pioneered by the late 19th-century provincial newspaper press, and most notably W. T. Stead in his early career as editor of the Northern Echo . The Bulgarian atrocities agitation of 1876, in which Stead played a leading role, was a hugely important and influential example, but is by no means unique. Freed from the shackles of metropolitan news production where journalistic innovation was hampered by a proprietorial and editorial preoccupation with elite concerns and, typically, merely recording and commenting on parliamentary affairs, Stead was able to exploit latent demand for a wider range of news material which meshed sensational detail with a strongly moral call for action. An important related theme is the strong link between radical newspapermen and the now forgotten world of provincial nonconformity. Through Stead and others—notably C. P. Scott and the Manchester Guardian —provincial nonconformity found a new way of articulating its concerns which in due course reached a wider audience. The influence of nonconformist belief and patterns of worship on the evolution of journalism repays close examination, not least because Stead—and others like him—went on to school so many other prominent journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media scholarship has commonly regarded newspapers as an essential element of strong democratic societies: a forum that structures public debate, providing engaged citizens with coherent frameworks to identify, interpret and tackle complex issues. Despite general agreement on the merits of this goal, there is little empirical evidence suggesting it approximates the democratic role historically played by newspapers. We examined three decades of newspaper coverage of chicken meat production in the UK to find evidence relevant to the normative expectations of the democratic role of newspapers as forum for public debate, by means of a two-stage framing analysis of 766 relevant articles from seven outlets. We found mutually disconnected episodic coverage of specific issues whose aggregate effect is consistent with the diffusion rather than the structuring of public debate. Newspapers here afforded polemic rather than the systemic contestation expected. The polemic contestation we found, with diffusion of public debate as an emergent political effect, troubles the assumptions subsequent to which it is possible to argue for the democratic role of newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that discourses of a newspaper “crisis” should not be regarded simply as descriptions of the actual state of the press but also as a means by which strategic actors frame the situation. The emerging frames can have substantial consequences for media policy making. The study identifies four key frames used to portray the newspaper “crisis” and discusses their relevance for public debates in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Similarities and differences are examined through 59 in-depth interviews with policymakers and industry executives as well as a qualitative analysis of policy documents and relevant media coverage. The study demonstrates that debates on the newspaper “crisis” are only partly influenced by (1) economic realities and (2) media policy traditions in the six countries but also reflect (3) the strategic motives of powerful actors and (4) the diffusion of frames across borders, particularly those coming from the United States. A transnationally uniform paradigm emerges according to which the state is expected to play the role of a benevolent but mostly passive bystander, while media companies are expected to tackle the problem mainly by developing innovative content and business strategies. This liberal market paradigm displays one blind spot however: it does not seriously consider a scenario where the market is failing to provide sustainable journalistic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study conducts a framing analysis of British popular press representations of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during 1939–41, when the definition of the Soviet Union as Ally was conceived, dismissed, revived and finally embraced with an enthusiasm that endured to the eve of the Cold War. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the press framed an initially inscrutable third party to a bilateral conflict, and how it handled that party's transformation into an official ally. The definition of the Soviet Ally is found to be consistently reassuring and relational, with the Soviet frame depending upon other parties (particularly Britain) for much of its content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political accountability is defined as an important aspect of scrutiny. By analysing newspapers at three different points in time (1961, 1981 and 2001), this study suggests that the kind of scrutiny often mentioned in the literature, characterised by thorough investigations and disclosures of political wrongdoings, barely exists in the local press. By identifying other forms of scrutiny more closely related to ordinary news reporting, the study shows that one-third of the 1500 articles analysed display some degree of scrutiny. The local press plays an important role in communicating information and critique concerning the ways in which local authority service provision works and how political responsibilities are fulfilled. This study indicates that this role has been strengthened during the second half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article confronts the antirealist analysis of news journalism by introducing a realist perspective based on an application and an extension of some of John Searle's ideas on the subject. This realist point of view proposes two original hypotheses, namely that news is formally based on a prior reality and that this prerequisite reality is ultimately a given reality. Defending the first hypothesis is the idea that news is intentional in that it represents a state of affairs in a mind-to-world direction of fit. The second hypothesis argues that the social reality on which news is essentially based is almost always constructed from a brute reality through a process of iteration. The article then proposes a typology of journalistic brute facts: natural phenomena, biological facts, non-intentional mental facts, human accidents, selective actions, continuous behaviours, tendencies, dispositions, and other natural propensities and, finally, verbal manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study analyses a violent farmers' protest in Brittany in 1998 and its coverage by the French press, especially the local press, which is very influential in western France. The study argues that the structure of the local press can be represented by the metaphor of a Filo pastry with its various levels of local, county (département in France), regional and national news sections, generating an often quite distinctive framing of the same event. The study challenges the widely accepted idea of a structural bias in press coverage against social movements. The proximity of local journalists to the protest and their typically close, sometimes personal knowledge of many of the actors combine to produce a "comprehensive", often friendly coverage of the action, as long as this does not trigger the opposition of powerful challengers in the local arena. Newspaper reporting of this protest also reveals ambiguities concerning the newsworthiness of violence, which triggers both coverage and criticism. The study suggests that local journalists are able to express a "local" public opinion. The virtually "instant" coverage of even the smallest protest actions by local news sections, moreover, challenges the alleged centralising bias reported in many studies of social movements. Based on data from the analysis of national broadsheets, these studies typically consider only the newsworthy, "visible" part of protest events, which are reported more promptly and in greater detail by local newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]