Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

Newspapers, even at the local level, simply define news differently from local television or even national network and cable news. In local metro dailies, citizens were far more likely to learn about things like taxes, education, zoning commissions and the activities of government than they would in most other media. In the metro papers in Houston , Milwaukee and Bend , a third of the space was taken up by matters relating to government or domestic issues such as education. On local TV in those cities on the same day, by comparison, only 23% of the space was filled with those topics, and often they commanded only brief anchor reads read from wire stories — some of them from the local newspaper.

In the Houston Chronicle, for instance, readers of the front and local sections would have learned about:

• a major plan to reform two failing local high schools
• machinations in the Texas Senate over taxes
• a new plan in the legislature to revamp college admissions
• the arrival in Texas of a controversial border vigilante group from Arizona
• problems with university graduation rates
• the killing of a Texas House bill to aid the poor
• a drop in the governor’s approval rating

Not one of those stories earned a package on any of the city’s three main TV stations’ morning, evening or late newscasts. The state tax bill and high school reform plan were mentioned in brief tell stories in some newscasts. The others were completely absent.

Topics of News Coverage in Select Media

Percent of all Words or Time

 In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a reader could learn about a former Nazi prison guard who lives in the area losing his U.S. citizenship, the state lottery losing nearly a quarter-million dollars on a failed Super Bowl promotion, or a local Presbyterian college that argued that unionization and federal labor laws impinged on its religious freedom. Only one of those showed up on local TV — the Nazi prison guard story — and then only as a brief anchor read.

On local TV, instead, hometown news tended to mean mostly crime, accidents, traffic and weather. Crime and accidents alone made up half of all the newshole. In the local newspapers in the same cities, crime and accidents still made up a sizable share, but it was roughly half as much (28%). Local radio’s treatment of crime and accidents on this day was more on par with the local papers — 27%.