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A new PEJ study takes an in-depth look at tabloids and compares them to traditional broadsheet newspapers.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Sourcing, Viewpoints and Stakeholders in Sports Reporting One way to assess the quality of journalism is to look at sourcing. Specifically, the critical questions are how transparent is the sourcing, how deep is the sourcing, and what is the range of views offered in the story? To better understand sourcing, we took several steps. First, […]
Gender on the Page One of the most notable trends in sports over the past thirty years is the increasing prominence of women in sports at the amateur, collegiate and professional levels. In 1971, the year before Title IX was passed, there were fewer than 30,000 women competing in college sports. Today, there are nearly […]
Opinion A big issue in journalism today is the level of subjectivity that creeps onto the page, the concern that the distinction between news and opinion has become increasingly hard to make. The front of the sports section seems to contribute to this blurring. The sports reportage here, the study found, is considerably more likely […]
Topics Covered If the schedule dominates front-page sports coverage, what are the schedules followed the most closely? The big three sports – baseball, basketball and football. Two of every three stories on the front of the sports page were focused on these games. Of the big three, basketball led the way as the topic of […]
Conclusion In an age of multiculturalism and a time of global and national political divide, sports provides Americans with a safe, shared experience. People with seemingly little else in common can bond in St. Louis or New York or Charlotte over a team. This may lay at the heart of the familiar, even ritualistic nature […]
Introduction Throughout Europe today, it is not uncommon to see women wearing headscarves and men with skull caps and beards. On many European streets, shops now sport signs in Arabic and other Near Eastern languages and sell an array of exotic looking products from the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Indeed, […]
Enterprise Reporting, Recaps and Profiles The sports page’s reactive nature, its focus on the game of the day, may be best understood by looking at the number of stories that are initiated by reporters rather than events. Enterprise reporting was in short supply in the pages we examined. Overall only one in 10 (10%) stories […]
SAMPLING AND INCLUSION The content analysis study of sports pages was part of a broader study that looked at both text-based media (including newspapers and Internet news sites) and electronic media (including broadcast network and cable network news). The complete study can be found at www.stateofthemedia.org. In all, the sports study examined 2,081 stories from […]