Using news abstracts to represent news agendas

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 434-446

  Edy, Jill A ^a   Althaus, Scott L ^b   Phalen, Patricia F ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

^c GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEDIA INDUSTRY;

EID: 24044501906     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900508200212     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy, and Patricia F. Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts to Track Broadcast News Content: Possibilities and Pitfalls," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46 (September 2003): 473-92.
2. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action" in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Harper, 1948), 95-118.
3. Ray Funkhouser, "The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public Opinion," Public Opinion Quarterly 37 (spring 1973): 62-75.
4. Jian-Hua Zhu, James H. Watt, Leslie B. Snyder, Jingtao Yan, and Jiang Yansong, "Public Issue Priority Formation: Media Agenda Setting and Social Interaction," Journal of Communication 43 (winter 1993): 8-29.
5. Pippa Norris, "The Restless Searchlight: Network News Framing of the Post-Cold War World," Political Communication 12 (October-December 1995): 357-70.
6. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
7. Maxwell E. McCombs and Salma I. Ghanem, "The Convergence of Agenda Setting and Framing," in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Stephen D. Reese and Oscar H. Gandy (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 67-82.
8. Thomas J. Johnson, "The Seven Dwarfs and Other Tales: How the Networks and Select Newspapers Covered the 1988 Democratic Primaries," Journalism Quarterly 70 (summer 1993): 311-21.
9. James W. Dearing, "Setting the Polling Agenda for the Issue of AIDS," Public Opinion Quarterly 53 (autumn 1989): 309-329.
10. Daniel Riffe and Alan Freitag, "A Content Analysis of Content Analyses: Twenty-Five Years of Journalism Quarterly," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (winter 1997): 873-83.
11. Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy, and Patricia F. Phalen, "Using Substitutes for Full-Text News Stories in Content Analysis: Which Text Is Best?" American Journal of Political Science 45 (July 2001): 707-723;
12. Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts";
13. Cheryl Zollars, "The Perils of Periodical Indexes: Some Problems in Constructing Samples for Content Analysis," Communication Research 21 (December 1994): 698-717.
14. See, for example, Roberto Franziosi, "The Press as a Source of Socio-Historic Data: Issues in the Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers," Historical Methods 20 (winter 1987): 5-16;
15. Robert Burrowes, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Comparison of Event Data Sources," in Comparing Foreign Policies: Theories, Findings and Methods, ed. James N. Rosenau (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 383-406;
16. Gary Hoggard, "Differential Source Coverage in Foreign Policy Analysis," in Comparing Foreign Policies: Theories, Findings and Methods, ed. James N. Rosenau (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 353-81;
17. John Woolley, "Using Media Based Data in Studies of Politics," American Journal of Political Science 44 (January 2000): 156-73.
18. For more information on archiving practices at Vanderbilt, see Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts."
19. Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts."
20. Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts."
21. Robert L. Brennan and Dale J. Prediger, "Coefficient Kappa: Some Uses, Misuses, and Alternatives," Educational and Psychological Measurement 41 (fall 1981): 687-699. This measure accounts for the posibility of coders agreeing by chance. Brennan and Prediger's kappa for individual coding categories ranges from 1.0 to .97, slightly better than the .957 figure for overall coding reliability because coding for presence versus absence of a particular topic is a simpler coding task than is choosing among several topical categories.
22. This measure was constructed by dividing the number of seconds devoted to a topic in a story by the total running time of the story (in seconds). Measures of total running time were derived from the Vanderbilt Abstract entries, which record time boundaries for each story. In cases where the division of stories in the abstracts did not match the procedure for unitizing being followed by the coder, the coder was instructed to estimate the story's running time by dividing the total number of words in the text defined in the abstract entry by the total number of words in the coder's story unit, which in discrepant cases was always a fraction of the abstract's story unit. This proportion was then multiplied by the abstract's time estimate to determine the coded story's running time. As the original videotapes of newscasts were unavailable for measuring the amount of time within a story that was devoted to a topic, estimates were calculated based on the number of words in a transcript that were devoted to a topic. A sample of 51 stories was selected to compare the number of transcript words contained in a story to the running time of the story in seconds. Dividing the story's total running time by the total number of words it contained and the averaging across the 51 cases produced an estimated mean of one word per .32 seconds (s.d. =.08). This time estimate was then multiplied by the number of words devoted to a topic to produce an estimate of the amount of time devoted to a topic.
23. Althaus, Edy and Phalen, "Using Substitutes for Full-Text News Stories in Content Analysis."
24. t(26)=1.62, p=.12; the t-test for the significance of differences between regression coefficients from independent samples is described in Jacob Cohen and Patricia Cohen, Applied Multipled Regression/Correlation for the Behavioral Sciences (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983), 55-56.
25. Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts."
26. Althaus, Edy, and Phalen, "Using the Vanderbilt Abstracts."