Ośrodek Badań Prasoznawczych jako fenomen

Abstract

The Press Research Centre in Cracow is presented here as a phenomenon or something extremely unusual. The circumstances of its creation in the Polish People’s Republic in 1956 were already quite unusual. A small group of young people were allowed to set up a research laboratory within the framework of the big press publishing house. They were wise and modest enough to invite prominent and well-known university sociologists, psychologists, linguists, economists, historians, lawyers, etc. to cooperate with in the study of mass communication. After three decades, the small provincial laboratory became a research institute with a national range, recognizable globally among researchers of mass media and public communication. It has enriched with the signifi cant publications almost every fi eld of knowledge on periodic mass communication and, in particular, the history of the press (re-release of the fi rst Polish newspaper from the 17th century), social and psychological factors of the reception of the media (based on opinion polls), descriptions of the content of periodic mass media (based on systematic content analyzes), linguistics (the fi rst Polish frequentative dictionary of the language in newspapers and description of the propaganda language of the 1970s), the press law (compendium: law on the press), the economics of the periodical media (“Press as a commodity and enterprise”), and above all, bibliography and documentation (inter alia “World Directory of Mass Communication Researchers”). In the years 1974–1990 the Press Research Centre functioned also as CECOM or the Central European link of COMNET, a worldwide documentation network of UNESCO.