Concludes that in Michigan, reporters focused on covering the governor and that state representatives received more coverage than did senators. (FL)

To explore the theoretical relation of newspaper competition to overall news quality, a study used a model of newspaper competition based on economic assumptions to investigate whether the product quality of a newspaper is positively related to the financial expenditure on it, and whether newspaper circulation is positively related to quality.…

Explores how Indiana state legislators use statehouse reporters for information and publicity purposes, identifies characteristics of lawmakers associated with particular motivations for using reporters, and relates these characteristics to how reporters are perceived to influence the policy making process. (FL)

Employing a "resource dependency" model from organizational theory, this paper explains the growth of newspaper cooperation out of publisher competition in Chicago (Illinois) journalism during the period 1880 to 1910. It suggests that publisher cooperation in business matters also resulted in a changed news coverage style and emphasis. It argues…

Examines the usefulness of constructs tapping "external" and "internal" influences on statehouse reporters in Michigan and Indiana. (FL)

Contributes to scholarship on news coverage of political campaigns by examining how Michigan's nine largest daily newspapers covered the 1996 presidential campaign. Finds that stories were significantly imbalanced in favor of Dole. Finds that chances were nearly even that any encountered story was one sided, but two-sided stories were likely to be…

A study examined how statehouse reporters covering the 1982 session of the Indiana General Assembly used information sources. Specifically, it focused on reporter reliance on key senate leaders, on the visibility of those senators in published stories, and on the institutional images transmitted in stories in which those and other senators were…

Explores agenda-setting implications of indexing news content by topic instead of by salience cues. Suggests significant differences in news topic exposure on equivalently concentrated patterns of readership in two versions of a newspaper. Readers evaluated the indexed newspaper negatively, but a reader core liked the indexing. (NKA)

Data gathered in a study of news coverage of the parttime Indiana and fulltime Michigan state legislatures were used to determine if source use in stories, portrayals of lawmakers and of the legislature as a whole, and topic coverage varied with the length of the legislative session. A content analysis was conducted of the 111 stories written by…

Reporters' perceived concern for their editors' news priorities and their own role self-concepts were examined for their effects on how reporters covering the Indiana State Assembly used diverse sources of information. Subjects, 34 reporters and 39 state senators, were surveyed concerning their contacts with each other during the 1982 legislative…

A study tested five sets of hypotheses derived from an interaction model of the ways reporters and legislators exchange information. Three hypotheses attempted to distinguish among election-oriented, policy-oriented, and specialist legislators in the ways they seek information, and two hypotheses predicted the patterns of reporter-legislator…