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This quantitative content analysis applies the theory of instrumental actualization to Swiss newspaper coverage of smoking bans in public places. The theory holds that journalists' opinions affect news selection; it is studied here for the weighting and evaluation of arguments in news stories. The editorial stance of newspapers was related to the weighting of argumentative fields and the frequency of contradiction of different standpoints. Therefore, elements of both a dialectical (papers of different stance explicitly contradicting one another) and a rhetorical (papers of different stance speaking of different matters) model of discourse were [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts that occur across ethnic and/or religious identity lines generally have underlying root causes such as economic marginalization and political competition. Yet when these causes are ignored by politicians and the media, and conversely differences in ethnicity and religion are simply propagated as the main conflict causes, this may have serious consequences for people's perceptions concerning the possibility and feasibility of peaceful conflict resolution and coexistence. In this paper, we investigate to what extent Nigerian newspapers practice peace journalism by emphasizing underlying causes of conflict in their reporting rather than stressing ethnic and religious divisions. We make use of a sequential mixed methods approach, which combines a quantitative content analysis of news reports with semi-structured interviews with Nigerian newspaper editors and journalists. Our results indicate that Nigerian newspapers do not explicitly use divisive language when discussing conflicts, but they rarely stress underlying structural causes either. While there is a willingness among Nigerian journalists to avoid potentially escalatory language, a dearth of resources and capacities impedes independent and in-depth analysis concerning the underlying drivers of conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the market has produced a differentiation inside the Chinese press between an ‘official’ press with traditional propaganda functions on behalf of the Communist Party and a ‘commercial’ press whose objective is to maximise revenue. Scholarly opinion has differed over whether marketization undermines Party control and whether new forms of journalism have arisen that lead to conflicts. These discussions have rested on little evidence as to the practises of Chinese journalism. This article presents empirical data on the extent of the differentiation, reporting on a content analysis of the national news in People’s Daily and Southern Metropolitan Daily. These titles are popularly believed to represent the polar opposites of official, orthodox journalism and commercial, liberal journalism. The evidence presented here demonstrates that while there are indeed significant differences in the journalism of the two titles, there remains a substantial overlap in their choice of subjects, their use of sources and the degree to which news is presented ‘objectively’. Southern Metropolitan Daily does display some ‘popular’ features and does contain more ‘watchdog’ journalism, but it shares with its official cousin an emphasis upon the party as the source for news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microbiome has captured the attention of researchers and newspapers. We studied how the subject is covered in The New York Times, The Times, and El País via DowJones Factiva (2007–2019), analyzing aspects that included article type, word count, authorship, topic, and citation of researchers, organizations, and journals. We found that 87.6% of newspaper articles (409/467) were news articles and most were longer than 300 words (396; 84.8%), with The New York Times devoting the highest proportion to newspaper articles over 1000 words (99; 45.4%). While basic science findings received the most attention from newspapers from 2007 to 2015, topics related to medicine and nutrition attracted increasing attention from 2016 to 2019. Newspapers showed a domestic preference for their respective researchers, organizations, and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed the frequency and placement given to male and female sources and story subjects in newspaper coverage and their relationship to the gender of the reporter. A content analysis of 889 stories found that male sources and subjects received more mentions and were placed more prominently in the stories. Controlling for structural and editorial influences, results indicated that the presence of females in the byline is a significant predictor of females appearing within the news story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of profound transformation processes shaping news media markets during the last decade, in particular local and regional news markets are confronted with consolidation and concentration processes. As a result, newspaper organizations are required to adapt their organizational strategies and editorial routines to face these challenges. Among journalistic routines, the use of sources is a prime example for an analysis of changing patterns in news production. This article investigates regional newspaper's use of self- and media-citations in a longitudinal design (1995, 2006, 2015). Based on a content analysis of German regional newspapers (N = 4713 articles), we illustrate changing patterns in the use of sources over a period of 20 years. Results point to an increase in other media outlets as sources indicative of an eligible and cheap content sourcing strategy. Self-citation is mainly used in articles that cover regional and local events mirroring the core business of local news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public trust in the criminal justice system in England and Wales has been low since the 1990s, and accusations that the system is arcane, lacking transparency, soft on criminals and removed from the society it serves are common. The government, together with many lawyers, journalists and experts, believes that lifting the ban on televising trials may enhance the transparency of the judicial system, and eventually lead to higher levels of public trust. Drawing on the most systematic content analysis of the coverage of this debate between 1984 and 2016, we analyse how this issue was debated in British national newspapers. In addition to examining how newspapers presented this policy debate, we also explore how the coverage discussed the impact that filming trials could have upon journalistic practice. Our analysis shows how metajournalistic discourse resorts to high-profile and celebrity cases when examining journalistic practice. Newspapers constructed this issue as a quandary between increasing the transparency of the judicial system, and the risk that justice would become sensationalised, ignoring key elements in the debate, and the role that journalists themselves may play in that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the front page plays an important temporal and explicative role for audiences, especially when it comes to journalistic work during a disruptive media event such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks. As a special agent of mediatization, the front page offers the possibility of 'freezing' the very often long-lasting live coverage of the (ongoing) happenings. It does not stand in opposition to faster communication of news but the front page is a very special journalistic form that opens interesting ways to contemplate news temporalities on another level. Based on a thematic content analysis of 1017 international front pages, this article develops their typology in order to analyze how the event was covered globally and locally, all by pointing out the different journalistic forms that are utilized. The study shows that the type of front page that is emerging allows us to grasp the coexistence of shared visual and textual regimes without leading to a false idea of a totalizing uniformity of information and thus of future social memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Have the nature of printed news stories changed in competition with new media? Our content analysis of Norway’s largest morning newspaper Aftenposten in four time cuts between 1950 and 2008 revealed that the length of news stories had increased until 2008 when the newspaper had changed to the tabloid format with a mixture of both brief and lengthy articles. News stories tended to have broader time frames in more recent years. The frequency of simpler forms of news stories like reports of meetings and social events had diminished considerably. In the last 20 years, journalists have also become more visible in the text. We will look at these findings against a historical background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A content analysis of 6525 randomly sampled political news stories from national, regional and weekly newspapers in six western countries between 1960 and today examines to which degree discursively defined reporting styles correspond to conceptual typologies of media systems and historical classifications of journalistic traditions. Univariate and multivariate analyses of three key indicators (opinion-orientation, objectivity, negativity) reveal three approaches to newsmaking: a US-led model of rational news analysis, an Italian-led model of polarized reporting, and a Germanic model of disseminating news with views. Merging a historically informed institutionalist approach with systematic content analysis, the study’s main contribution to comparative communication research is to clarify our understanding of divergent models of journalism, contextualize existing media-system typologies, and revise assumptions about the affiliation of individual systems to certain models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mainstream US newspapers since the 1890s moved away from event-centered news of local persons and places and toward interpretative news of more distant issues, a trend called the new long journalism that continued when the press moved online. By the mid-2000s social media and web interactivity were common, and print news had not yet entered the profitability and jobs crisis-to-come. A study in 2005 replicates and extends the baseline measures of online news content. The long journalism trends continued for politics, a core topic in serving the public, and for NYTimes.com, a leader in the media and innovator online. But for breaking news topics such as accidents and for less prominent news outlets, online content moved toward shorter, less analytical coverage linked to individuals, other current happenings, and an especially local focus. The results show how journalists were experimenting at a key moment in the development of online news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents information on a study that provided overviews of developments in the space arena and of research on space coverage using a content analysis conducted on all space-related stories and editorials found in the "New York Times" newspaper during the time period January 1 to December 31, 2000. Methodology of the study; Results and discussion on the study; Conclusion.