Some Procedures for Estimating "News Hole" in Content Analysis.

This article suggests ways in which the content analyst may reduce the size and drudgery of the news-hole task. The main problem involved in calculating the proportions is that of obtaining an appropriate denominator term without spending exceedingly large amounts of time and money in hand-measuring nonadvertising space, or "news hole." The numerator term usually is no great problem, in as much as the space occupied by the relevant categories ordinarily is obtained during the coding process. It was necessary to express the amount of relevant content as a proportion of total news hole. In the organization International Press Institute study, the relevant content was measured in column-inch units, so the news-hole denominator had to be obtained in the same terms. It was discovered that the coders were taking almost as much time per newspaper issue to hand-measure the news hole as they were taking to perform the complete locating and coding job for the foreign news items. Since the denominator data had very limited usefulness compared with the rest of the findings, something had to be done to simplify the news-hole procedure.