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Local journalism in the UK has been described as being in "crisis". Local newspapers have experienced years of declining circulations and staff cuts, leading to questions about how effectively those institutions can continue to perform normative functions of journalism. One of those is to report on the courts. Through analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with local newspaper reporters who cover the courts beat, agency court reporters who supply the local press, as well as broadcast journalists involved in both local and national court coverage, this paper helps to establish how the daily newswork of court journalists has developed amid a turbulent period in journalism, especially local journalism. The research finds that court reporting has been less affected than other news beats but faces a series of challenges related to financial cuts and other pressures. While the local press has become even more essential to the provision of court reporting, a central part of the news media's fourth estate role, those challenges affect the ability of court reporters to perform this function. This paper recommends that policymakers consider using a form of public funding to guarantee the future of court reporting at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

As the penny press was getting started in cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, a thousand miles to the west Chicago's early newspapers followed a different path. The party papers of Chicago in the years from the city's founding in 1833 to the Great Fire in 1871 grew to incorporate elements more typically associated with the penny press even as penny papers that started there during the period failed. Chicago's party press by the 1850s and 1860s had begun to shed its formal ties to political patrons as journalists served larger and more diverse audiences, both earlier than has been thought and in more sophisticated ways than has previously been described. Also briefly examined in the article is the possible development in this period of the "scoop" by Chicago's post-Civil War journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the manner in which the newspaper "Votes for Women" evolved to challenge and compete with the press prior to 1912, within a discussion of the Women's Social and Political Union's (WSPU) wider press strategy. The populist style may simply have been considered the most appropriate means of conveying news of the militant campaign's sensational activities; new methods of protest necessitating new means of communication. However, viewed within the wider context of the WSPU's activities, the paper's populism should be considered a deliberate part of an organizational press strategy. The attempts to attract, and subsequently influence and critique, news coverage indicated the Union's press-aware outlook. With this cognizance sharpened by intensifying press hostility to militancy, Votes for Women's populist format, together with its efforts for mass-circulation, signaled an effort to confront apparent press prejudice by marketing an alternative source of suffrage news to a large audience.

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]

During the communist period Estonian media, especially cultural media, played an important political role by serving as a forum for fairly open discussion of political issues. With the regaining of independence the role of the media has changed, but they have been flexible and quick to adapt to market conditions and Western professional standards. As in other post-communist countries, liberation from censorship and state control was followed by an enormous expansion of the press market and then a contraction after a few years. Many papers now have lower circulation and/or lower frequency than in the past. The author documents the many changes in Estonian newspaper publishing with statistics drawn from obligatory deposit and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the relevance of the media history of the press. Using a broad and open media concept, this perspective should be understood as the study of the construction and communication of the self-images and ideology of the press. Rather than describing the complex of problems as images that are 'spread' through one channel (newspapers) by one actor (the press), it should be seen as a mutual exchange between various media and various actors. Different audiences have been resources for the press, just as the press has been a resource for them. Instead of separating proper journalism, the spreading of the self-image, and the reception of different audiences as clearly defined areas, they must be seen as constituting each other. Focusing on the funeral of Swedish editor Lars Hierta, the paper argues for the methodological advantages inherent in the media event and the surrounding cultural circumstances. [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]

The author discusses the development of the Polish émigré press in Great Britain for the period since 1940. The paper discusses the chief newspapers and periodicals published over the intervening sixty years, and mentions the principal editors and personalities affiliated with these publications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 analyses the representation of immigrants in four Spanish national newspapers,El País,El Mundo,La RazónandABC, between 1 June 2013 and 31 June 2014. Seven days per month were randomly selected, each corresponding to a different day of the week; 91 editions of each paper, 364 in total, were analysed. Of the 289 items relating to immigrants, 179 in which one or more photographs appeared in addition to text were chosen for analysis. Among the main results, two stand out: first, immigrants do not usually have an opportunity to communicate directly with readers and, secondly, the treatment of news items on immigration by the four Spanish newspapers is variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an account of being a Soviet journalist before and during glasnost. Soviet reporters' weapons are still the pen and the notebook--the cost of a personal computer is about the same as a reporter's lifetime salary. It was not a big deal to me when Mikhail Gorbachev, the godfather of glasnost, recently asked the Congress of People's Deputies for a moratorium on the new press law which the same Congress had accepted only half a year ago. If you read ten different newspapers of the Brezhnev era, you would have found no difference: they all had the same mother. Pravda sometimes publishes articles that absolutely contradict Gorbachev's speeches, although Gorbachev is still the general secretary of the party that he has almost dismantled. Three years ago the same Ogonyok, with Vitali Korotich as the editor, published the truth about Adilov--that he took bribes and shared money with the first party secretary of Uzbekistan, that he had personally killed more than ten people (it is not possible to know the exact number--too much time has passed).

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]

In 450 years of existence, the written press has never faced a change with the intensity and consequences as those of the Internet. The decision of going online represents a whole set 0/opportunities and threats that publishers must carefully weigh. Once they have made the step, newspapers find themselves in a completely different competitive environment. They deal with different competitors, business models, customers and patterns of consumption. The present study explores such patterns of consumption by using data from 15 Spanish newspapers, covering time periods from 2 to 20 months. Characteristics of the printed newspapers and general patterns of the Internet are also analyzed in order to isolate the factors that enable an Internet newspaper to achieve a high level of readership. The findings indicate that reading patterns on the Internet strongly differ from those in the physical world, particularly when we consider weekday versus weekend circulation. The use of the newspaper is different too: reading of Internet newspapers is usually more functional and goal oriented, as indicated by the small number of pages read per visit. These and other results can provide publishers with valuable insights to understand this new frontier in the history of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the change in regime in Hungary in 1989, there were also great changes in the Hungarian press. The press became free, in both the political and legal senses. Newspaper and magazine publishers were privatized. The number of periodicals issued yearly mushroomed, then declined. There were also large numbers of title changes, caused primarily by political and economic factors. Developments in newspapers, magazines and journals for various audiences are discussed. Technology has also changed the face of periodical publishing in Hungary: the authors estimate that as of 1998, at least 250 online periodicals were being issued in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the coverage of women's sport in UK media rises to comparable levels to men's sports during large sporting events like the Olympics, academics agree that “routine” women's sports coverage is under-represented. According to the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation, “81% of people think that the female athletes at London 2012 make better role models for young girls than other celebrities.” This article examines the representation of women in sport and compares routine coverage of women's sports in the UK national press across a week in February 2012, six months before the London Olympics, with coverage in a week in February 2013, six months after the Olympics, to see if there has been an Olympic “legacy” that increased coverage. It also examines coverage at the same time of year a decade earlier, to see how far, if at all, women's sports coverage in newspapers has progressed. The results suggest that there has been minimal change in everyday coverage of women's sports after the Olympics, and that female athletes continue to be hugely under-represented in the UK press. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ombudsmen are profoundly a part of the ethos of newspaper journalism. In this essay, I argue that Daniel Okrent's tenure as the public editor of "The New York Times" provides American journalism and individual ombudsmen a model by which to meet part of the ethical standard Meyers (2000) posits. I assume that individual ombudsmen should assert moral authority in the position through a persuasive use of rhetorical ethos. The ethical appeals of Okrent and Michael Getler, ombudsman at the "Washington Post," were compared. Despite structural and institutional similarities in the positions, Okrent's ethical appeal fits Meyers' model and Getler's does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues of the journals in the newspapers and tabloids, and their historical forms. The selection of language plays an essential part in the creation of an imaginable national community within the pages of the daily reading materials. To give a broader context to the language of the national community as constructed, they also integrate the popular version of history into the language to ensure that the national community's representation will not be the one to be suspended in a constant present, but one which comes with all the collections of the historic past.

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 discusses the increase of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet press has discovered the delights of the expose. It was also uncertain who had arranged for the tanks to be exported, and why, although the prime minister himself seemed to be involved in the deal, as was a joint state-private cooperative known as Automation-Science-Technology (with the Russian acronym ANT). Novoe Vremya correspondent Boris Balkarei tried to sort out the roles of Soviet government and party officials, ANT cooperative leaders, and a mysterious Sudanese businessman, who later sued the magazine for libel in a Russian court. Although Soviet TV and radio generally have continued to shy away from aggressive questioning of the government and party on national security and foreign policy stories, numerous newspapers and magazines took their lead from Ogonyok.

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]

In this article, we develop and test an economic theory of Supreme Court news. We hypothesize that information about the Third Branch is newsworthy when it has lower production costs and qualities attractive to the audiences and advertisers desired by news organizations. We examine Supreme Court news in elite newspapers, television news broadcasts, and online news sources during the October 2008 and 2010 terms. The results of our quantitative analyses indicate that all three types of news outlets are more likely to provide content about Supreme Court decisions with substantive importance but vary in their responses to costs and qualities appealing to the lay audience. We conclude by discussing the similarities and differences among news outlets with regard to their selection of Supreme Court information as news content. [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]

There are several fundamental reasons why the state should not involve itself in the regulation of the press. However, there are also more practical reasons why self-regulation can be a preferable alternative, benefiting journalists and the public alike. It is flexible, non-bureaucratic and highly effective at delivering practical solutions to problems. Ultimately, self-regulation can raise standards and provide effective redress to those who are wronged by the press. But it does so by working with journalists, not against them. What follows is an examination and analysis of the origins and practices of the press regulatory bodies of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, together with an exploration of current issues and solutions adopted, and the identification of future issues deriving from convergence, accountability and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the ways children are presented in the mainstream news media has recently become a focus of attention in Media Studies, stressing news approaches that oscillate between demonizing children and picturing them as a powerful symbol of victimization. Furthermore, children themselves do not make any statements: they are simply not heard. Similarly, there is an emphasis on episodic events, imbued with emotional or moral components. There is also a focus on risk situations, delinquency or parental advice on how to deal with new generations. This contrasts with little attention being paid to economic and social policies based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Based on these ambivalences, a longitudinal analysis of Portuguese newspapers (1970-2000) and a comparative analysis of European newspapers during a week in 2000, have been carried out in order to determine what and how they report children and related issues, and what frames have been changed or maintained. Consequently, the article explores the many facets of reporting and the implications for our public life, particularly with regards to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Sand's newspaper publishing activities - from their inception in 1841 to their decline at the end of the Second Republic - deserve recognition within the history of the press. Hitherto neglected writings are analysed as a hybrid form of literary journalism according to some definitions of the genre provided by Norman Sims. This permits a focus on Sand's 'flights of imagination', articles written under pseudonyms and in the voices of fictional characters, created as a tool for idealistic political education. The now classic Benedict Anderson paradigm of 'imagined communities' is used to contextualise Sand's use of the vernacular and helps to position her contribution towards the use of newspapers as a vehicle for the communication of democratic and progressive ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The author of this article illustrates the transmission of news from England to the newspapers of the Habsburg Netherlands over the 40-year period 1620-1660, and the types of news so conveyed. Such news of politics, war, diplomacy, religion, trade, justice, and prodigies, came not only directly from England but also through news centers on the Continent, indicating the flexibility of the communications networks. Newspapers, in the sense of printed news periodicals available to the general public, made their appearance throughout Western Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century.

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]

This article explores journalistic quoting practices as an interface between written and oral modes of communication, or between text and talk. Examining both the prescriptive and performative dimensions of journalistic quoting across media, the article demonstrates that when quoting, journalists do not adopt modes of communication relative to the medium being employed but instead creatively mix and meld text and talk, regardless of the medium. The article suggests that this invocation of both modes of communication renders a distinction between text and talk invalid in contemporary news discourse. It further suggests that the cogency of news presentation might depend on the interchangeability of both modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a quantitative analysis of Radio Australia's Indonesian news and current affairs programs in the seven days after the massacre, conducted by Radio Australia shows that the story was given extensive coverage. In that week, of the 626 news stories in the international news bulletins in Indonesia, 45 were about the Dili shootings, compared with 23 on other Indonesian issues. In terms of time taken up by the stories, 15.8% of the total was about East Timor and 4.5% about other Indonesian issues. In the current affairs program, International Report, of 48 new items, eighteen dealt with the Dili killings and one with another Indonesian story. In terms of duration, the East Timor story took up 37.5% and the other Indonesian story 2%.