To investigate the relationship between newspaper readership and community involvement in a nonmetropolitan area, data were collected from a random sample of 300 residents of one California county. The county has one daily newspaper and four weeklies. Subjects were asked if they read a newspaper once a week or more, if they subscribed to any…

Despite longstanding interest in cable television regulation, little has been investigated concerning crossownership of cable with other media properties. A study examined the issue from economic (antitrust) and First Amendment (diversity of sources) perspectives. Data on where the cable companies' franchises were located and in what other media…

To examine the role that items on the list of "What Literate Americans Know" (developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) plays in the nation's literacy, a study conducted an electronic search of "The New York Times" to establish the frequency of occurrence for a sample from the list. A random sample of 424 terms (9% of the total list) was…

A study was conducted to compare the news reporting of religion specialists and nonspecialists at three major metropolitan newspapers. Representing different news policies and structural constraints, 1,164 religion news items from the "New York Times," Minneapolis "Star," and the Richmond (Virginia) "Times-Dispatch"…

Jacques Ellul defined "prepropaganda" as the subtle and sophisticated use of news services to improve an authoritarian government's public image. Because its value is directly related to its being used sparingly, he predicted that prepropaganda would increase when an authoritarian government felt threatened and decrease when it once more…

Critics of international news flow characteristics have charged that news is biased toward the interests of the developed world and against the developing world, thereby giving an unrepresentative image of their countries to the United States reader. A study was conducted to examine the output and presentation of reports by foreign correspondents…

Finds editorial writers highly educated, well satisfied with their positions, well paid, and active in community and public affairs. (RB)

Survey data on newspaper food editors and newspaper readers were collected through a title-rating technique. Analysis of responses to 40 food titles and leads indicated three newspaper food-editor types: transitional, traditional, and "new guard." Food-page readers fell into two types: information oriented (nutritionists) and cooking…

Concludes that traditional and modern, renamed women's pages are not meeting the contemporary needs of American women. (RB)

A survey of 65 newspaper editors and 64 television news directors was conducted to examine policies concerning unnamed sources and unattributed information in news stories, and to measure the effects of the incident in which a "Washington Post" reporter fabricated a major story and claimed that she had granted her sources…

Defining development as a participatory process within a society aimed at creating or maintaining social structures and institutions that allow a society's present and future needs to be met, a study was undertaken to discover what kind of treatment was given to development news by Third World media. Eleven foreign newspapers from a university…

A study was conducted to assess the indications in print of news borrowing (reporting news distributed by second hand or government controlled sources) in the 1970s, and to examine the relationship between borrowed news and the restrictions and reductions in newspapers' overseas news staff. The "New York Times" and the "Chicago…

Twenty-six American Newspaper Publishers Association research reports published since 1978 are reviewed in this paper. The paper analyzes each of the reports in order to provide an overview of what their findings really say and what newspapers can do in their own market areas to use the findings to improve their product. Among the topics covered…

This report provides a review of literature exploring accuracy in newspaper stories. The findings discussed do not reveal definite reasons for inaccuracy, but several possible error sources are delineated: amount of reporter involvement, type of news, psychological factors (stress, news reporters' fantasies, open/closed-mindedness, tendency to…

The railroad and newspaper industries grew up simultaneously during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, coming together in the common effort of delivering newspapers by rapid trains. The newspaper trade literature from that era contains romantic accounts of the exploits of these trains, while comparable railroad trade literature infrequently acknowledges…