A study of 150 residents of a small southern Illinois city suggests that there are significant correlations between local daily newspaper content and what people in the community report reading and talking about, but that there are only nonsignificant partial correlations between the newspaper's and the residents' agendas about local news. (GW)

The study reported in this paper expands the arena of agenda-setting to include the content of a small daily newspaper and what the people of that community say they read and talk about during a non-political period. The newspaper's agenda was established by content analysis of 51 issues, resulting in classification of 3415 stories in 41 content…