Article
A more national representation of place in Canadian newspapers
The Canadian Geographer
(2014)
Abstract
In their design and content, North American daily newspapers construct a complex representation of the
locality they serve and its place in the world. That construct involves the quality and quantity of local news,
relative to news in other geographic categories, and how stories from each category are displayed in the
newspaper’s pages. This article describes a content analysis that quantified and compared the representations
of locality and place in the print versions of two Canadian metropolitan daily newspapers between 1894 and
2005. The results show a marked increase in both the number of national stories and the priority given to
national news in the final decades of the 20th century, mirrored by a sharp decline in the number of local
stories and the priority accorded to them in the Ottawa Citizen. The same trends were seen to a lesser extent
in the Toronto Star, a longtime champion of the local. The article concludes with a discussion of possible
reasons for this phenomenon and its relationship to political and technological developments in the final
decades of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.
Keywords
- media geography,
- newspapers,
- content analysis,
- sense of place,
- local news
Disciplines
Publication Date
2014
DOI
0.1111/cag.12104
Citation Information
Carrie Buchanan. "A more national representation of place in Canadian newspapers" The Canadian Geographer Vol. 58 Iss. 4 (2014) p. 517 - 530 ISSN: 1541-0064 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/carrie-buchanan/4/
Creative Commons license
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