The study used a survey of newspaper city hall beat reporters to explore the impact of newspaper and television news competition on their coverage of city hall. Newspaper competition was much more likely to affect content than TV news competition, but TV can have an impact on some reporters, especially in the absence of newspaper competition. Competition was related to reporters having less time for in-depth stories, reporting unimportant stories and, to a lesser degree, an increase in sensationalism in city hall news. Competition also was related to increases in the number of stories and an increased likelihood that reporters would cover stories they might have missed without competition. Perhaps the most interesting results were the strong relationship between competition and reporter-editor interaction and the impact of this interaction on reporters' perceptions of content changes.

A content analysis of ten years of New York Times coverage of human rights in China has found that The Times set its own agenda in covering human rights in China, apart from the US presidential agenda. While presidential concern about human rights in China subsided and US-China trade became a priority in the presidential agenda, The Times increasingly continued its coverage of human rights in China. There was no increase in presidential concern about human rights in China or increased Times coverage in the election years compared with non-election years. The evidence over ten years of news coverage also suggests that despite a relatively independent rate of production of human rights news stories by The Times, neither incumbent presidents nor their opponents treated human rights as a high visibility, independent issue or as a separate issue in foreign policy. Instead, references to human rights were consistently entwined with other issues, both foreign and domestic.

This study supports the conclusions of a 1993 study by Blankenburg and Ozanich that the degree of public ownership affects the financial performance of media groups. High levels of stock ownership outside the media group result in increased returns to stockholders. The current study included competition as an independent variable and found that groups had lower operating margins and spent a greater percentage of revenues on expenses when a higher percentage of newspapers faced newspaper competition. Overall, the impact of public ownership was slightly greater than that of competition.

No abstract

A national survey of 227 city hall reporters found that they believe their daily newspapers do a good job of covering the beat. Those surveyed said slightly fewer reporters covered city hall in 1997 and space allocated to city hall remained about the same as five years earlier.