In July 1986 the "Knoxville Journal" (a Gannett newspaper) changed its publication time from morning to afternoon and the "Knoxville News-Sentinel" (a Scripps-Howard newspaper) changed from afternoon to morning. One month later, researchers surveyed by telephone 505 newspaper subscribing households to examine reader opinions…

The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 makes it possible for competing newspapers to combine advertising, production, circulation and management functions into a single newspaper corporation. For the attorney general and the courts to authorize a joint operating agreement (JOA) for a "failing newspaper," certain conditions must be met…

A study was conducted to determine whether a relationship existed between the agricultural slump of 1924 and the economic vitality of rural weekly newspapers in Missouri. "Rural weekly newspaper" was defined as any weekly newspaper in a predominantly agrarian locale with a city population of fewer than 5,000 and a county population of…

A study examined the treatment of Chinese affairs in four American newspapers during December 1949, when China fell to Communism. Content analyses were conducted on issues of the "New York Times,""The Christian Science Monitor,""The Chicago Tribune," and "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch." Each of the 416…

A study examined newspaper coverage of the United States' withdrawal from Unesco to determine whether the public was given a balanced picture of the issues involved and to examine the degree of impartiality of the coverage of one specific issue, the New World Information Order. The study analyzed reports that appeared in American daily newspapers…

Few individuals think of the theatrically exhibited motion picture as supported by advertising like other major forms of mass communications. Cinema screen advertising can be defined as the presentation of individual advertising messages on movie theatre screens in a distinct and discrete fashion. Screenvision ads run prior to the start of each…

A study investigated whether the frequency of a legislator's direct contact with constituents was related negatively to the legislator's evaluation of mass media as sources of information on constituent concerns. The study also explored whether the legislators' evaluations of mass media as sources of information on constituent concerns were more…

A study examined the advertising of Japan and the United States to determine if commercial messages reflect the cultural values of a particular society, thereby indicating the need for specialized campaigns. It was hypothesized that the majority of Japanese advertisements would use the traditional appeals of group, consensus, soft sell, veneration…

A study investigated the relationship of campaign media attention to cognition, strength of the commitment to the candidate choice, and probability of voting. The 1985 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia was selected for analysis. A model constructed for predicting voting tendencies hypothesizes that the role of the mass media is largely indirect,…

Sexism and racism in advertising have been well documented, but feminist research aimed at social change must go beyond existing content analyses to ask how advertising is created. Analysis of the "mirror assumption" (advertising reflects society) and the "gender assumption" (advertising speaks in a male voice to female…

A study investigated whether three types of journalistic material--news stories, news articles, and news reports--could be reliably distinguished from one another, and whether these genres had differential appeal to audiences. News reports are defined as succinct reports of facts, while news articles represent a more analytic form of reporting,…

Collected from 55 universities in the United States and Canada, and published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, this volume contains 339 abstracts of research dissertations and theses accepted for graduate degrees in journalism and mass communications from July 1, 1986 through June 30, 1987. Only research…

The concept of "deregulation" of the broadcast media has dominated the regulatory landscape for the past decade, inexorably altering the range of possibilities available for racial and ethnic pluralism in the mass media. Deregulation has created a regulatory atmosphere in which the permissibility of regulation is judged by whether the…

Dada was a collective movement among avant-garde artists who rejected the existing culture of post-World War I Europe on the grounds that it belonged to the same society that had produced the war. This paper discusses Dada typography in relation to typography's role and function in the history of printing, the changes resulting from the…

A study examined the different approaches that daily newspaper and weekly newspaper editors take toward letters to the editor. It was believed that (1) editors of weekly newspapers would regard as more important letters referring to the community positively, while (2) editors of daily newspapers would regard as more important letters dealing with…