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The Daily Diet of News: Variation in Newspaper Content

How much diversity of topics is there in our national print media? What constitutes "the news?" Are all newspapers the same? If newspapers differ, what are these differences due to?

This study tries to answer these questions. It broadly defines news content as any story that appeared in the newspaper and then sorts the stories into 25 possible topics. Using a sample of 101 daily newspapers across the United States, it produces an accurate picture of the "daily diet of news" offered by newspapers in the spring of 2000.

The main findings of this report are that the average newspaper devotes more than half of the space it has for stories to Sports, Politics/Government, Business, and Crime. It also shows that newspapers vary in how much space they allot to each topic, and that, on the whole, the relationship between content and market variables is negligible.

Download a PDF version of this report here.




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