Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (82Nd, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 3-8, 1999)
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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 433 567 CS 510 148 TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (82nd, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 3-8, 1999). Newspaper, Part 1. INSTITUTION Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. PUB DATE 1999-08-00 NOTE 303p.; For other sections of this proceedings, see CS 510 132-153. PUB TYPE Collected Works Proceedings (021) EDRS PRICE MFO1 /PC13 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Baseball; Content Analysis; Credibility; Foreign Countries; Higher Education; Information Seeking; Journalism Education; *News Reporting; *Newspapers; Presidential Campaigns (United States); World Wide Web IDENTIFIERS Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; Local News; *Media Coverage; New York Times; Times (London) ABSTRACT The Newspaper, Part 1 section of the Proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "Local News Coverage Strategies in a Three-Way Daily Newspaper Competitive Market" (Patsy G. Watkins); "Enterprise and Investigative Reporting at Ohio Metropolitan Newspapers in 1980 and in 1995" (Joseph Bernt and Marilyn Greenwald); "The Great Home Run Race of 1998 in Black and White"(G. M. Bush); "Journalists' Perceptions of Online Information-Gathering Problems" (Bruce Garrison); "Analytical Journalism: Credibility of Computer-Assisted Reporting" (Justin Mayo and Glenn Leshner); "Journalists and Gender: An Analysis of 'The New York Times' Coverage of the 1996 U.S. Presidential Election" (Kimmerly S. Piper-Aiken); "The Quest for Credibility through the Public Dialogue in Correction Boxes, Letters to the Editor and Columns Written by Newspaper Ombudsmen" (Neil Nemeth and Craig Sanders); "The Metro Wide Web: How Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Is Changing Online" (Jane B. Singer); "'You Had To Be There'(And They Weren't): The Problem with Reporter Reconstructions" (Russell Frank); and "'The New York Times' and 'The London Times' Cover War in Bosnia and Croatia, 1991 to 1995: Press Nationalism and U.S.-British Hegemony Over Bosnian Policy" (Lawrence A. [Luther] Di Giovanni). (RS) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (82nd, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 3-8, 1999): Newspaper, Part 1. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. 1999-08 PERMISSION TO REPRODUCEAND U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION HAS Office of Educational Research and Improvement DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION BEEN GRANTED BY CENTER (ERIC) /This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization BEST COPY AVAILABLE JNiL6 originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. RESOURCES TO THE EDUCATIONAL fl INFORMATION CENTER(ERIC) Points of view or opinions stated in this LJ document do not necessarily represent 1 official OERI position or policy. Local News Coverage Strategies in a Three-Way Daily Newspaper Competitive Market Patsy G. Watkins, PhD Lemke Department of Journalism University of Arkansas Kimpel 116 Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701 501-575-3601 [email protected] Local News Coverage Strategies in a Three-Way Daily Newspaper Competitive Market ABSTRACT An exploratory study examines local news coverage strategies in the first months of an unusual competitive market situation involving three dailynewspapers. The market is a two-county area including four main medium-sized cities anda few dozen small towns. Content analysis was used to determine the amount and topics of local news coverage allocated to the various muncipalities in the market to find out if the papers were substitutes for each other. 4 Local News Coverage Strategies in a Three-Way Daily Newspaper Competitive Market This research examines local news coverage of three competing daily newspapers in the first months of the three-way market. The purpose is to determine the strategies of the papers in defining local news, which in turn suggests how each defines/delineates the market. Are these papers substitutes for each other in their local coverage, or do readers have to take multiple subscriptions to get news coverage of the specific areas they want to know about? The northwest corner of Arkansas offers a highly unusual competitive newspaper market situation. Since July 1998 three dailies The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, The Northwest Arkansas Times, and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette have been competing head-to-head-to-head for readers and advertisers in one of the healthiest economic areas of the country.1 The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas (MN) and the Northwest Arkansas Times (NAT) have maintained a fairly mild level of competition in this area for some years; however, in summer 1998 the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (DG) of Little Rock entered the market with a daily zoned regional edition.2 The market itself is unusual. The typical competing newspaper market tends to be the large metropolitan area. This market, however, is comprised essentially of two counties Washington and Benton which include four small cities (the largest is about 56,000) and perhaps five dozen small towns (with populations from approximately 200 to 3,000). The total population of the two-county area is approximately 270,000. Media observers in Northwest Arkansas describe the competition among the three papers as intense; some informally call it a "war."3 Battles have been waged through slashed subscription prices and skirmishes around ad rates.4 A major question, however, is what effect this competition has had on the news sections of the papers. A major factor in research evaluating the effects of competition has been local news coverage. As an area of great interest to readers, local news is not only significant in competition, but also accessible to researchers.5 Previous research on competitive newspaper markets suggests that there are some qualitative changes that occur, and that these changes tend to vary with the level of intensity of 1 5 Three-Way Daily Newspaper competition. Quality of content has been related to the financial commitment of the paper to the competition and the resulting levels of allocation of resources to the newsroom for example, to fund increases in reporters and in salaries, and the addition of wire services. 6 Local news coverage is particularly interesting in competitive markets because there is a certain substitutability of such papers.? Since each paper must meet a certain fundamental standard of coverage in any market, they all are likely to be highly similaror substitutable in local news coverage. Therefore, defining how a paper deals with coverage of local news becomes a challenge for editors and owners. The competitive market in Northwest Arkansas presents a special problem for determining local news coverage. There are city governments, public schools and law enforcement agencies in the four main cities, as well as many of the several dozen small towns. In addition, there are two county governments which deal with issues that span city limits. Substitutability becomes an interesting matter when the market presents so many possible configurations for the definition of local news. Literature Review The relationship between competition and coverage was first formalized in a "financial commitment theory" by Litman and Bridges (1986) in which they described newspaper performance as the financial commitment of newspapers to providing their editorial product. Lacy (1992) further elaborated on the theory in developing a Conceptual Model of Financial Commitment. The bottom line, according to Lacy, was that intense competition does have some effect on news media content, and that effect is basically positive from the audience's perspective. Wanta and Johnson (1994) added another consideration: they found support for the "sociology of news" theory which suggests that news content will not necessarily vary for papers in competitive markets. Because of developing standards for journalistic performance and increasing professionalism in the field, news tends to be homogenized, no matter what the market structure. 6 2 Three-Way Daily Newspaper However, Lacy, Coulson and St. Cyr (1998) questioned reporters on city hall beats across the country and produced evidence which supported the relationship of competition to news content. They found that beat reporters, in responding to a survey, perceived that competition did "have some impact on their behavior and their content." Competition had both negative and positive effects. While reporters had less time to develop in-depth stories, for example, more stories were covered, including some which might have been missed in a less competitive situation. Reporters are thus likely responding to the dual needs to get at least the same. story as the competition, and then to get something more. Lacy (1989), Bigman (1948) and Schweitzer and Goldman (1975) suggested that similarity in content is linked to competition among newspapers. Moreover, "Intense competition is associated with a high degree of substitutability." (Lacy 1989) In the analyses of competing newspaper markets, local news has long been considered a significant factor. Bigman (1948) in his study of the decline in competing newspaper markets as a threat to free expression, considered local news by comparing coverage of