CONTENT ANALYSIS OF SHAMS AGRICULTURAL MAGAZINE

Abstract

This study aimed to conduct content analysis of Shams agricultural magazine, through: 1) analyzing the content of the magazine’s topics in terms of number and area, 2) analyzing the content of magazine’s images in the covers and internal pages in terms of number and area, and 3) measuring magazine’s readability using Flesch’s equations for reading ease and human interest. In order to achieve these objectives, the study performed the content analysis on the magazine issues published in 2014 (12 issues). Frequencies and percentages were used for result presentation. Findings of the study could be summarized as: the most frequent sections was ads, while the least frequent sections were irrigation, soils and the issue file. Regarding the topics, results show that the most frequent topics were fruits, vegetables, ornamentals and field crops within all magazine’s sections except the agricultural mechanization section. Results also showed that citrus topics has ranked first among fruit crops, cabbage among vegetable crops, wheat & corn among field crops, and timber trees among ornamental plants. The results also reported that all of the magazine’s front covers depends on one single image except one issue which depends on a colored area, fruits images ranked first followed by field crops, medicinal and aromatic crops. Regarding the back cover, one half of the issues relied on one image and the other half depends on more than one image or colored area, and the majority of those pictures belongs to vegetables and fruit crops. The most frequent images within the inside pages were in the ads and horticulture sections, while the least frequent images were in the sections of irrigation and soils. With regard to measuring the magazine’s readability, results shows that the overall average sentence length was 40 word/phrase, which goes beyond the proper average for reading ease. With respect to the human interest, results showed that most of issues (January, April, June, August, October, November, and December) located within the medium suspense category according to the degree of human interest. Overall, the magazine’s human interest degree (14.18) made it a medium suspense magazine according to the Flesch’s human interest formula. At the end, the study concludes some recommendations for improving the contents and readability of Shams agricultural magazine.