| Because this little experiment was based on different cities with only one newspaper per day, it is difficult to draw any conclusions. Thus the following is simply interesting. If, however one wanted to do a study newspapers and their possible effects on a community, it would need to be done over a longer period of time before conclusions can be made. For example, one needs to read the articles, in order to get a sense of it's tone. Right now, for this purpose, it is a quick snapshot, and it's simply interesting. |
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A Newspaper Experiment
Be engaged. Do stuff. It doesn't take long, and you can learn interesting things.
As I traveled in the United States screening the film, I thought it would be interesting to deconstruct different newspapers from different cities. You can do this over, say, a week (or however long you want) and you might be able to see trends and make some conclusions about your own local paper. It would be interesting to do this with foreign papers, from both the developed and developing world, on the same day to see what type of articles and advertisements are printed in different papers. For this simplistic exercise, this is what resulted.
I started with two copies of the same newspaper and cut them up to see how much space was devoted to articles and how much was devoted to advertisements.
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Here's the Kansas City Star from September 13, 2008.
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Quite fascinatingly, in this paper, there were about 6 pages of articles, and about 7 and a half pages of ads.
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Here's the Columbia Daily Tribune from Sept. 16, 2008
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Interstingly, this newspaper had a very different presentation of its news. I wonder what type of effect it has on the community. Which came first? The chicken or the egg? What influences what?
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Here's the News-Democrat from September 17, 2008, serving SW Illinois
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This one had about 5 pages of articles and about 4 pages of ads. Each newspaper also had a different layout and presentation of its sections. This one had main news, Nation & World and Opinions in the first section.
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Here's the Patriot News, the Pennslyvania Newspaper of the Year from Harrisburn, PA from Sept. 18th, 2008.
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This paper had the main news, business section, opinion and weather in the front section. It had bout 10 pages of articles, and about 7 pages of ads.
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Here's the Morning Call from Allentown, PA from September 19, 2008
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This newspaper had about 8 pages of articles and about 4 pages of ads.
There are intersting similarities in all of the papers for their main source of information - Associated Press, and there was also similarities in advertisers. It would be especially interesting to compare advertisers, frequency of national advertisers and see if there is a connection to their respective national policies. The treatment of topics, topics chosen and writing styles vary across different papers, but the presidential campaigns were discussed in all of them.
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