Journalists' knowledge of news is finally reducible to their commonsensical understanding of it, which is to say that common sense is not still another way of dealing with how journalists know news but instead the very foundation on which that knowledge rests. Common sense does not simply entail some shared cognitive facility that enables people…

To determine how journalists at two metropolitan newspapers view good writing and writing coaches, questionnaires were distributed to all full-time newsroom personnel (including journalists and editors) involved in preparation of news at two large dailies under the same ownership in the same city, in July, 1986. The total number of respondents was…

Given the increasing influence of public journalism on the daily routines of newspapers across the United States, students need to be taught how to find a workable balance between consulting and reporting on conventional information sources and consulting and reporting on the perspectives provided by ordinary citizens. This paper discusses ways in…

A study focused on isolating the differences in perceptions community newspaper editors have about the functions of their newspapers, and determining how those attitudes affect the editors' definition of news and, ultimately, the content of the newspapers. The study hypothesized (1) that the perceptions community newspaper editors have toward the…

Since the most pervasive ethic of American journalism is that of objective news reporting (the apparently impartial reporting of verifiable data from a detached point of view), a study examined how and to what extent general news reports differed over time in terms of objective reporting. The news content in six representative daily newspapers for…

In focusing on the epistemology of journalism, this paper seeks to determine how reporters, particularly investigative reporters, know what they know. It begins by distinguishing between the validity of knowledge claims and their everyday justification, assuming the latter to be the proper focus for a phenomenological study of what passes as…

This study examines the coverage of the Rosenberg case in the "New York Times,""Chicago Tribune," and the "New Orleans Times-Picayune," from 20 May until 22 June 1953, the month prior to the execution. These three major metropolitan dailies represent different geographical areas and political orientations. It was…

A field experiment tested different reporting and writing techniques against standard practice. The underlying purpose of the project was to explore whether new techniques of writing might make the news more interesting to those who are "aliterate" (they can read but do not read). On each of four days, four reporters reported and wrote…

This paper examines the paratextual structure of news texts, i.e., the headline system (superheadline, main headline, and subheadline) and the lead. In the first part of the paper T. A. van Dijk's interdisciplinary theory (1988) of "news in the press" is reviewed with special reference to the status and function assigned to the paratext.…

American "New Journalism" of the 1880s and 1890s--a blend of the popular press and the elite political and literary journal creating a comprehensive general interest newspaper that informed, entertained, and editorialized on politics--became the model for the modern daily newspaper in the Western World. The American emphasis on news and…

Arguing that educational research rarely makes it into print, this paper discusses what is wrong with educational research, what is wrong with the press, and offers suggestions for improving the relationship between educational research and the press. The paper argues that (1) education research is badly underfunded; (2) the most pressing…

Noting that past local media coverage of environmental topics, including those dealing with radiation topics, has often been superficial, a study assessed press coverage of the radon problem in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania during the first nine months of 1985. The study explored whether local media coverage of radon--a colorless,…

A study analyzed the coverage by 15 American newspapers of a single foreign news story, the assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme on February 28, 1986. Issues of the newspapers for the first week after the murder were examined and total coverage of the event, measured in number of words, was calculated for each paper. In addition,…

A survey of religious news in American newspapers from 1849 through 1960 shows a number of changes in the way such coverage was carried out. Some 1,018 daily and weekly newspapers representing different sized communities, different geographical areas, and different times in the church year made up the sample used for a content analysis of…

In 1977, John C. Merrill, a mass communication scholar, found that many scholars believed that the sixties movement of new journalism is in some way related to existentialism. To find this out, a study identified six main themes of the philosophy of existentialism (as espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre) and looked for the presence of these themes in the…