A more national representation of place in Canadian daily newspapers

Abstract

In their design and content, North American daily newspapers construct a complex representation of the locality they serve and its place in the world. That construct involves the quality and quantity of local news, relative to news in other geographic categories, and how stories from each category are displayed in the newspaper's pages. This article describes a content analysis that quantified and compared the representations of locality and place in the print versions of two Canadian metropolitan daily newspapers between 1894 and 2005. The results show a marked increase in both the number of national stories and the priority given to national news in the final decades of the 20th century, mirrored by a sharp decline in the number of local stories and the priority accorded to them in the Ottawa Citizen. The same trends were seen to a lesser extent in the Toronto Star, a longtime champion of the local. The article concludes with a discussion of possible reasons for this phenomenon and its relationship to political and technological developments in the final decades of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. Une représentation de plus en plus nationale du lieu dans les quotidiens canadiensLes quotidiens nord-américains construisent, tant par leur conception que dans leur contenu, une représenta-tion complexe de la localité qu'ils desservent et de la place que celle-ci occupe dans le monde. Celle-ci se traduit par la qualité et la quantité de nouvelles locales en proportion des nouvelles liées aux autres catégories géographiques, et par la façon dont les reportages sont classés selon les catégories et présentés dans les pages du quotidien. Cet article fait état d'une analyse de contenu visant à quantifier et comparer les représentations de la localité et du lieu dans les versions papiers de deux quotidiens de régions métropolitaines du Canada publiés entre 1894 et 2005. Les résultats révèlent que la forte croissance du nombre de reportages d'envergure nationale ainsi que la place prioritaire donnée aux nouvelles nationales au cours des dernières décennies du 20 e siècle, vont de pair avec la baisse nette du nombre de reportages locaux et de la priorité que le quotidien Ottawa Citizen leur avait accordée. Si on repère cette tendance également dans le quotidien Toronto Star, elle est moins prononcée compte tenu que ce quotidien a longtemps défendu les couleurs locales. L'article se termine par une discussion sur les raisons qui pourraient expliquer ce phénomène et son rapport avec les évolutions politiques et technologiques au cours des dernières décennies du 20 e siècle et du début du 21 e siècle.

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