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The article presents information on the use of Internet's interactive technologies by newspapers to improve the coverage of public affairs. "Cyber-democracy" proposes that the Internet's ability to close gaps of time and distance with electronic interactivity has the power to make institutional journalism at least anachronistic and perhaps even unnecessary. Online Web sites associated with newspapers can offer themselves as venues for greater citizen engagement because newspapers are the traditional source of the most in-depth information regarding political communication, especially at the state, regional and local levels, and also because they are the focal point for online news consumption. The study found that the promise of online journalism to create conditions for improved political communication is largely untapped. It found that only three of the 13 devices used to operationalize online facilitation of cyber-democratic practices were present at more than 50 percent of the papers surveyed in the study.

Previous research has attributed media convergence to, among other things, where the news was originally published. That research, however, has struggled to identify causal relationships between a news item's publication in a particular outlet and journalists' perceptions of a story's newsworthiness. This relationship is difficult to identify because of the correlation between publication in a particular outlet and many other factors that also impact newsworthiness. This paper uses an experiment embedded within a survey of over 1,500 U.S. political journalists to test the impact of a news story's previous publication history on journalists' views of the newsworthiness of that news item. Compared with previously unpublished stories, the publication of a news story in a national paper has no significant positive effect on the perceived newsworthiness of a story. The origin of a story in a local outlet, however, causes journalists to perceive that story to be less newsworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Analysis of Facebook and Twitter activity of 38 U.S. daily newspapers found strong correlation between the news organizations' use of social media tools and the size of the community and circulation of the print edition. Larger papers were more effective in using social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines newspaper coverage of protests from 1960 to 1999. Initial findings indicated protests received consistent levels of support over that time. In light of this, we expected little change in the extent to which these protests challenged the status quo. However, there was a steady decline, with protest coverage becoming less deviant throughout this study. Further analyses suggest disparities in coverage of different protest-types were apparent during the Vietnam War. The most drastic change in treatment of different protest-types was directly after the height of the anti-war movement followed by gradual change thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparisons of online newspapers reveal few differences between public and non-public online papers. Also, online and print editions of the public journalism newspapers did not show that public journalism is better practiced online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the implications of market-driven journalism for daily newspaper content. Impact of market-driven journalism on U.S. news organizations; Reasons for the controversial nature of market-oriented journalism; Topics covered in papers with relatively strong and weak market orientations.

Assesses the importance of subgroup influence within the context of higher-level predictors of design variability, including newspaper competition and usability of technology. Impact of variability in newspaper design on the paper's economic and cultural trends; Traditional predictors of design variability; Influence of occupational subgroups in newsrooms.

Reports on the results of a four-year case study of organizational development at the "Saint Louis Post-Dispatch," a newspaper founded by Joseph Pulitzer. Connection between change initiatives and producing a better newspaper; Challenges faced by the paper at the end of the 20th century; Contribution of "Saint Louis Post-Dispatch" editor Cole C. Campbell to the field of journalism.

This article focuses on the subject index of the articles published in this journal. Some of the articles based on newsgathering are "Beauty and the Beasts: Significance of Press Coverage of the 1913 National Suffrage Parade," by Linda J. Lumsden, "Civic Journalism and Nonelite Sourcing: Making Routine Newswork of Community Connectedness," by Brian L. Massey, "Comparing Distinctions and Similarities across Websites of Newspapers, Radio Stations, and Television Stations," by Carolyn A. Lin and Leo W. Jeffres, "Differences in Knowledge Acquisition Among Readers of the Paper and Online Versions of a National Newspaper," by David Tewksbury and Scott L. Althaus, "The Metro Wide Web: Changes in Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Online," by Jane B. Singer, "The Mundane and the Arcane: Prestige Media Coverage of Social and Natural Science," by William Evans, "News of Hurricane Andrew: The Agenda of Sources and the Sources' Agendas," by Michael B. Salwen.