For English-speaking researchers, French doctoral dissertations can represent a "terra incognita." For this reason, a retrospective bibliometric study of French dissertations in press and media studies offers a useful profile of available research to researchers concentrating in studies of the press and other media. The present study…

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports…

Describes the development and validation of a method for pretesting the reader interest value of comic strips and cartoons so that the "best" ones may be selected for printing from the available options. (Author/GT)

Applies fantasy theme analysis to explain the rhetorical vision that emerges from newspaper and broadcast news coverage of Fred Rogers. Notes that journalists have created a fantasy about Rogers that holds him up as the embodiment of television's potential. Concludes that when journalists do this they step outside their usual role as objective…

Changing from a non-profit foundation to a for-profit corporation, "Ms." magazine recently passed through a transitional phase, transforming its image to attract more advertisers. Four issues published after the fifteenth anniversary issue, when the new image was introduced, illumine both the hegemony of patriarchal capitalism and the…

Examines common scholarly characterizations of the American penny press of the 1830s and 40s that together provide a myth of origins of the contemporary U.S. press. Criticizes inaccuracies and misleading elements in this mythology and its implications for subsequent debate about U.S. journalism. (JK)

This essay critiques the depictions of rank and file newsworkers of the 1920s and 1930s that are offered in traditional journalism histories and in cultural, social, and women's histories of the press. Following a tradition established in the first half of the 20th century, contemporary media historians continue to reify the use of other standard…

School reform involves the public: its expectation of participation and its support for a reform agenda. In theory, the press influences both. To explore this link, we compare education coverage in four press outlets, two each in Chicago and Cleveland. Articles and editors are interrogated for (1) style of journalism and (2) assumptions about the…

Supports multiple regression analysis as a tool for isolating the impact of newspaper content on newspaper sales. (RL)

Proposes a framework to join journalists and communications scholars in dialog about conditions that best promote public dialoge of democracy itself. Sketches a news policy model, reviews research indicating areas of agreement about the dynamics of press-government-public interactions, and looks at steps toward a field of study built around these…

Sections of the newspaper "USA Today" were compared with corresponding sections of four major newspapers--the "New York Times," the "Wall Street Journal," the "Los Angeles Herald Examiner," and the "Los Angeles Times"--to determine what editorial components made "USA Today" different and…

With the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos from his 20-year rule of the Philippines, the news media regained its freedom and its voice, and now faces a new set of problems: low circulation, questionable ethical standards of reporters and their lack of experience, and ominous indications from the Corazon Aquino government that the administration might…

This special report provides a survey of media in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and attempts to answer questions such as: what freedoms the mass media enjoy, the nature of their finances, what problems they have to deal with, and what their future in competition with new modes of communication will be like. Chapter 1 discusses the…

In studying the history of the American press, little attention has been given to printing networks and the apprenticeship system, factors which permitted the press not only to survive but to grow. Essential to press growth was the apprenticeship system, vocational education which replenished and augmented the craft's practitioners. Apprentices…

An important resource for educators interested in incorporating material about mass media and race into their teaching might be academic research conducted in universities and media research organizations and published in academic journals. However, because certain forms of racial thinking "saturate" all forms of knowledge production in…