Spatial Aspects of Newsworthiness

Place, Distance, and Environmental News: Geographic Variation in Newspaper Coverage of nthe Spotted Owl Conflict

“…In many other instances, however, this distance-decay concept proves inoperative. A variety of studies have suggested that the likelihood of an event in a given place being reported depends more on the perceived newsworthiness of either the event or the place than on how far away the place is (Walmsley 1980;Brooker-Gross 1983;Gaddy and Tanjong 1986). Furthermore, studies of the amount of coverage only scratch the surface of potential distance effects, as variation in the content of coverage is arguably at least as important (Shoemaker and Mayfield 1987).…”

TV News Hyper-coverage and the Representation of Place: Observations on the O.J. Simpson Case

“…The process of selection and categorization does not end with determining what stories will be reported but also involves the arrangement of people and places into subcategories such as politics, the economy, hard news, soft news, domestic, international, etc. As noted by Fiske (1987, p. 287): ÒCategories are normalizing agents....Categories not only link stories, they also separate them.Ó Traditionally, geographers and communications scholars have paid close attention to the process of news selection, examining the varying degree of coverage devoted to places as part of the newsÕ larger patterns of geographic bias (Dominick, 1977;Walmsley, 1980;Brooker-Gross, 1983;Whitney et al, 1989;Hoare, 1991). Much of this research identiÞed geographic images transmitted through television news by place-name counting.…”

“…However, no systematic differentiation was made on the type of story (e.g. military, entertainment, disasters, culture, science) as had been done by Whitney et al (1989) and Brooker-Gross (1983). This can easily be done in future extensions and reÞnements of the study.…”

“…This notion that coverage of one place can block out or overshadow the coverage of other places is not a new idea in studying geographical representations in television news broadcasts. Earlier research has established that television news provides a rather incomplete representation of the world geographically (Dominick, 1977;Walmsley, 1980;Brooker-Gross, 1983;Whitney et al, 1989;Hoare, 1991). In his seminal study of geographic bias in national network newscasts, Dominick (1977) found an ÒeclipseÓ effect in which over-coverage of a single state usually brought under-coverage of other states in that region.…”

“…Recent work in geography emphasizes how places are assigned cultural meaning and represented through the mass media (Burgess and Gold, 1985;Burgess, 1990;Macdonald, 1990;Zonn, 1990;Adams, 1992;Aitken and Zonn, 1994;Rose, 1994;Kong, 1995;Hanna, 1996). Within this growing literature are studies that examine how the journalistic practices and organizational interests of the news media shape the production of place images (Brooker-Gross, 1983, 1985Burgess and Gold, 1985;Myers-Jones and Brooker-Gross, 1994;Parisi and Holcomb, 1994;Prince, 1995). These, like the present study, primarily examine the production (or encoding) of meaning into media texts rather than their consumption (or decoding).…”