University of Southern Mississippi
Are People Reading Local News? A Content Analysis of Popular News Stories on Nine Newspaper Websites
Abstract
dc:description.abstract<p>The news industry has come under tremendous pressure in the last decade. None more so than the newspaper industry, which has seen all aspects of its operation: readership, revenue, staff, distribution and reputation decline dramatically. This study uses content analysis to examine the reading habits of news consumers from nine newspaper-based websites from the Advance Publishing chain. The samples were the stories in the “most popular this hour” list, examined every 5 days from August to September, 2014. These stories were separated into categories such as news, sports, business, etc., and further coded based on their proximity to the news organization. The goal is to understand what stories people are reading and discover any trend in their behaviors. This study is guided by niche theory, and the results show the theories at work as readers of these sites overwhelmingly gravitated towards two niche categories: local news and sports, and disregard the other offerings on the websites.</p>
Degree
thesis:*- Name thesis:degree_name
- Master of Science (MS)
- Level thesis:degree_level
- Masters Thesis
- Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
- Mass Communication and Journalism
- Year dc:date.available
- 2015
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Chen, Peter Shiang
- Contributors dc:contributor
-
- Fei Xue
- Mary Lou Sheffer
- Chris Campbell
Subjects
dc:subject × 7Identifiers
dc:identifier.*- Repository record dc:identifier
- https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/90
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-1087