Newspapers

The history of the development of the party newspapers is
reviewed in the first chapter. The goal of the research was to
attempt to discover the uses and goals of state political party
newspapers.
Five propositions were proposed which would accomplish
this aim. The first proposition was to discover the extent to
which the state party paper is used to extend the publicity of
the state chairman. The second proposition was to discover to
what extent the party newspaper is used as a tool in finance and
fund-raising appeals. The third proposition attempted to reveal
to what extent the state paper is used to extend the publicity of
the incumbent governor. Proposition IV sought to ascertain
whether or not a party not holding the governor's office openly
criticized the state opposition party, while the incumbent party
merely spoke of its own accomplishments while neglecting the
opposition. The fifth, and final, proposition attempted to
ascertain whether less populous state Republican party papers were
more apt to relate themselves to the national Republican party
and administration.
The research method of content analysis was discussed
and the methodology used in this study was explained. The scores
for nine content categories were compiled and the findings from
a one-issue analysis of sixty-two papers confirmed Propositions
I-IV. The fifth proposition was disproven. A time analysis of six selected papers was performed and
these findings confirmed the findings of the one-issue analysis.
Furthermore, this analysis proved the existence of patterns of
column-inch space allocations in a state party newspaper.

This qualitative research study explores the relationship between reducing uncertainty and assigning source credibility in the context of social media sites (SMS) and examines the effect of uncertainty reduction within the social media environment on the development of relationships between journalists and their sources. For this study, interviews were conducted with professional journalists to determine whether uncertainty was reduced and credibility was established with sources via SMS (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and what theoretical strategies journalists used to reduce their uncertainty. The study also aims to determine if correlations exist between a reporter's age, beat, and/or personal adoption of SMS and the reporter's usage of SMS for source development. The interviews were conducted with 15 journalists of The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), using a standardized interview protocol. Subjects were asked to voluntarily participate in a face-to-face interview with the researcher. Reporters were selected based upon their gender and cultural ethnicity, which was representative of the newsroom demographics of The Palm Beach Post at that time. This research aims to contribute to the uncertainty reduction theory in the realm of computer-mediated communications, specifically with regard to the use of SMS in forming and maintaining journalist-source relationships.

The current study is a content analysis and comparison of news articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The objective of this study is to explore media coverage of terrorism over the last five decades to determine the impact of religion and to compare coverage between two respected news sources that are known for their liberal (New York Times) and conservative (Wall Street Journal) view points. Using a stratified random sample, 1,832 news articles were selected between 1960 and 2006 from the two news sources of interest. The articles were read, analyzed, and categorized. Then, a qualitative analysis examined a random selection of articles pertaining to religious terrorist events. Results suggest an increase in coverage of religiously perpetrated terrorism in recent decades. Interestingly, coverage from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal showed similar patterns despite being representative of opposite ideologies. Implications are discussed.