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This paper attempts to document the cultural influences which the United States exerts over Canada because of Canadian reliance on foreign news agencies, especially news services that are located in the United States. The print material used to document this paper was drawn from a 1967 study of news flows for the Canadian Department of External Affairs and a 1969 content analysis of 30 Canadian dailies for the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media. The broadcast material was gathered in a series of interviews done especially for this paper. The data in this case study is presented in both narrative and table form and the extent to which Canadian newscasts follow the American format and content when they are recorded for rebroadcast is examined. This news policy is especially significant when news is translated into French, but contains an American perspective on world events. The paper concludes with a five-point plan to solve the problem of Canadian reliance on foreign agencies for news. (RB)

In 1976, Jamaican government officals claimed that their island had received an especially negative press in the United States during 1975 and 1976 with serious consequences for the economy and tourist trade. This accusation was not made about Canadian coverage, with one major exception, and Canadian tourism to Jamaica increased during those years while U.S. tourism fell off considerably. A study was conducted with the hypothesis that coverage of Jamaica by the Canadian press was more positive than that of the U.S. press and that coverage of social change was less often presented in a cold war context in the Canadian press. An analysis of six daily newspapers in the U.S. and three in Canada showed that negative coverage in the two countries was about the same but that U.S. coverage did tend to emphasize the cold war context more than the Canadian coverage did. In addition, interviews with travel agents in both countries revealed that Canadian travel agents discounted negative news much more than their U.S. counterparts. It is suggested that media coverage had less effect on tourism than did the mediated influence of travel agents. (TJ)

This study tested the power of "elite nation" factors (trade, population, and gross national product) to predict the amount of foreign news coverage for specific countries. A composite week for the first quarter of 1975 was randomly drawn, and ten Canadian and twenty-nine United States newspapers were coded for all news items reported on those days, yielding the total number of column-inches of foreign news coverage in each country, with a breakdown by country or geographical area. As expected, a rather large discrepancy was found between Canadian coverage of the United States (49% of foreign news) and United States coverage of Canada (1.72%). However, elite nation factors proved to be poor predictors for the United States foreign news coverage, and only one of the factors, trade, showed any predictive ability for the Canadian press. The results suggest that the elite nations themselves do not base their foreign news coverage on such matters as trade relations, population distribution, or economic development. (Author/RL)

Kathleen Blake Watkins Coleman, known to her readers as "Kit," was a late nineteenth-century journalist who tried to escape the limitations of the woman's sphere in journalism through travel writing, while still complying with the expectation that she describe her adventures from a "woman's point of view." Among her many accomplishments, "Kit" went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American war for the Toronto "Mail and Empire," a stunt the newspaper hoped would boost circulation. Coleman's work in Cuba was recognized because of her determination to overcome almost insurmountable opposition by American authorities and many male colleagues who refused to recognize her as a professional and allow her to travel with the troops as most correspondents did. She was pressured to produce stories from a woman's angle, which meant that her work was seen as marginal. It also appears that her newspaper did not pay her full remuneration for her services. While (like her male colleagues) paying some lip service to American military interests, "Kit" was able to condemn the war from a "female" perspective--expressing concern, for example, for the soldiers on all sides of the conflict. "Kit's" enduring appeal throughout her 25 years as Canada's most successful woman journalist was due to her combination of "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics--she was outspoken, intellectual, emotional, and maternal. (Seventy-five notes are included.) (SR)

To investigate changes attendant upon the 1971 transfer of ownership of "The Windsor (Ontario) Star" from an independent owner to Southam Press Limited, owner of several Canadian newspapers, a content analysis was conducted of newspapers from the four-year period of independent ownership and the four-year period of Southam Press ownership surrounding the date of the transfer. Approximately 40 issues from each year were analyzed. All editorials and features on the editorial and opinion-editorial pages were examined with respect to area of interest, source of content, and direction of partisan political commentary. Editorial cartoons, letters to the editor, and front page lead stories were also examined. Among the major conclusions were that the change of ownership has not resulted in change in area of interest in any consistent pattern; that there has been a significant increase in the use of Canadian, rather than United States, sources in both front page leads and feature materials; and that more politically-oriented editorial and feature content is now being presented. The results suggest that the chain-ownership question cannot be dealt with adequately by the divergent hypotheses (socially desirable or undesirable) evident in the literature, but that the changes may be evaluated positively or negatively, depending on one's view of the role of a newspaper in a community. (GW)

Stunt girls have been understood traditionally as being part of the rise of sensationalism within newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper, instead, considers the stunt girl as a subject position involving a set of practices and ways of writing that risk traditional understandings of femininity and journalism. The risks these women took in transgressing these lines turned their public personas into spectacles, while simultaneously rendering them vulnerable to misunderstanding, scolding and scandals. Using articulation and feminist theory, it seeks to redress conventional approaches that devalue women?s contributions by maintaining divisions between ?hard? and ?soft? news forms by considering the ?whole newspaper? as it was understood and used by readers. The stunt girl wowed her readers with her journalistic exploits that traversed the world and spoke to the changing role of women within the public spaces of late Victorian society. She helped to popularize a new set of journalistic principles that survive today, including personal journalism, investigative practices, and an ongoing dialogue about what the concept of ?newsworthiness? meant to women readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]