Content analysis (Communication)

Do newspapers consider their readership and its interests when choosing which news to print? The Palm Beach Post, the Austin American-Statesman and the Dayton Daily News--all owned by Cox Enterprises--serve metropolitan areas with widely varying Jewish populations. A content analysis--including story length, placement and use of graphic elements--of newspapers printed in March and July 1994 looks at whether coverage of the Middle East varies among the three newspapers.

A database based on best manufacturing practices documents is explored relative to the "design" component of such best practices. This content analysis study yields lexical maps of key terms. Maps are categorized depending on their node arrangement in the following main groups: Cyclic maps, Sequential maps, Spoke-patterned maps and Isolated maps. A comparative study of names selected by different naming algorithms helps us in establishing the relation between map patterns and naming algorithms. Super network and distributions maps generated from the same database are useful in defining relations among the different maps. This study outlines the overall structure of design process through the maps' names and their interrelations.