A more national representation of place in Canadian daily newspapers

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.