Building a health promotion agenda in local newspapers

Abstract

This is an analysis of newspaper coverage of breast cancer topics during a community-based health promotion campaign. The 4-year campaign, called the Breast Cancer Screening Campaign (BCSC), was devoted to promoting mammography screening in a Midwestern state. The BCSC included both paid advertising and volunteer-led community interventions that were intended, in part, to increase the flow of information about breast cancer and mammography screening in the local mass media. Findings showed that intervention was positively associated with local newspaper content about breast cancer, but the effects were confined to communities served by weekly newspapers. We discuss the implications of this study for future community-based health promotion campaigns.

Prevalence and Framing of Health Disparities in Local Print News: Implications for Multilevel Interventions to Address Cancer Inequalities

“…Communities often view local newspapers as representing their voice (22), and stories that are locally produced and situated can strengthen personal relevance and thus increase information processing (23-25). Although some data suggest that health news stories are relatively rare in local news (23, 26), there have been efforts to increase coverage—for example, by using community-based campaigns to increase health information in local media (27) and issuing localized health news releases to promote health coverage in local newspapers (28). …”

Public Health Framing of News Regarding Childhood Obesity in the United States

“…Research has demonstrated that many Americans depend on news media for health information (Feeley & Vincent, 2007;Gellert, Higgins, Lowery, & Maxwell, 1994;Martinson & Hindman, 2005). To the extent that relevant coverage is accurate, it may encourage better health habits (Linkenbach, 2001).…”

Structural Pluralism in Journalism and Media Studies: A Concept Explication and Theory Construction

“…Second, although survey and content analytic procedures have been predominately used to study U.S. Census data, structural pluralism also should use other methodological approaches, such as online archive analysis (e.g., Yellow Pages to collect number of institutions such as schools, churches, businesses), quasi-experimental designs (Martinson & Hindman, 2005), and a composite ''Media Vector'' (Pollock, 2007) combining measures of content with measures of editorial judgment or article prominence to examine structural pluralism and its influence. Social network analysis (e.g., Wasserman & Faust, 1994) also can be a useful method for cross-community comparisons (e.g., Hindman, 1996), as it can capture community (power) structure, such as interlocking relationships among community elites (e.g., Donahue et al, 1995;Dreier, 1982).…”