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Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as 'the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms'. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick 's popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick , provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was conducted to determine the reading habits of students at Punjabi University Patiala. The focus of this paper is to ascertain the average time of reading of students and their choice of reading material. A questionnaire was developed to collect the primary data and distributed among the students via Google form. The data was analysed by simple percentage method and presented in bar charts. Book remain the most preferred reading material for the students, followed by newspaper, class notes, journals, magazines, and thesis / dissertation. The majority of students read general knowledge books followed by subject related books. A large number of students read from both paper and digital. Respondents prefer to reading in the morning time. The Library is the preferred place by the respondents for reading. The majority of the respondents are motivation from the teachers for reading. Major hindrance to reading habit by the students is less time and more use of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Canada becoming the first G20 country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, there has been increasing interest in the emergence of this new marketplace. Newspaper framing helps to shape public opinion on legalization and news sources play a role in determining how the public perceives the use of cannabis. This research analyzes how mainstream newspapers reported on the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada in the years before and after legalization (between 2016 and 2019). Using a content analysis of 1,390 cannabis-related articles, 11 dominant reporting themes are identified. Over time, there was a shift from negative and sensationalist cannabis news coverage toward more balanced and progressive framing. The findings identify the influence of editorial political stance on thematic coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional discovery environments now serve as central resource databases for researchers in the academic environment. Over the last several decades, there have been numerous discovery layer research inquiries centering primarily on user satisfaction measures of discovery system effectiveness. This study focuses on the creation of a largely automated method for evaluating discovery layer quality, utilizing the bibliographic sources from student research projects. Building on past research, the current study replaces a semiautomated Excel Fuzzy Lookup Add-In process with a fully scripted R-based approach, which employs the stringdist R package and applies the Jaro-Winkler distance metric as the matching evaluator. The researchers consider the error rate incurred by relying solely on an automated matching metric. They also use Open Refine for normalization processes and package the tools together on an OSF site for other institutions to use. Since the R-based approach does not require special processing or time and can be reproduced with minimal effort, it will allow future studies and users of our method to capture larger sample sizes, boosting validity. While the assessment process has been streamlined and shows promise, there remain issues in establishing solid connections between research paper bibliographies and discovery layer use. Subsequent research will focus on creating alternatives to paper titles as search proxies that better resemble genuine information-seeking behavior and comparing undergraduate and graduate student interactions within discovery environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Donald Trump's political campaign, Americans have appeared increasingly divided over public opinion issues and U.S. policies with the media seemingly reflecting these divisions. One of Trump's early initiatives was the "Muslim ban," which restricted visitors from seven Muslim‐majority countries. Focusing on the portrayal of Muslims in over 900 hand‐coded articles, our study uses multilevel modeling techniques to examine how newspapers changed their frames and claimsmakers in discussions about Muslims before and after Trump was elected. After the election, newspapers were more likely to include government claimsmakers and an immigration frame and were less likely to mention a radical terrorist leader or portray Muslims as violent. Trump's election and the ban may have ushered in a more sympathetic view of Muslims with more articles focused on them as victims of violence and negative expressions. Across counties, states, and newspapers and between the national versus local presses, we find almost no significant differences in how Muslims were portrayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to understanding news audiences in rural areas, scholars often focus on declining readership and the challenge of how to encourage existing audiences to pay for content. There too has been burgeoning interest in news avoidance more broadly in digital spaces, with an emphasis on studying those who actively or intentionally resist or reject the news. This paper explores a gap in the research by seeking to understand the conditions and circumstances in which people who do not engage with their local news in print or digital format might be activated to do so. The paper presents the findings of an Australian survey of Facebook users who live in rural and regional areas and identify as people who do not engage with their local news. Findings highlight the need to conceptualise a subsection of the audience who express a desire to engage with their local news but perceive barriers to doing so. These barriers include cost, accessibility and perceived quality of content. We introduce the term 'latent' audience – potential news consumers who remain hidden from industry and scholarly view until changing conditions and circumstances lead to their manifestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research puts forward the theoretical concept "print imprint," articulating the connection between the printed newspaper and its reader's "Self." This paper contends that the printed newspaper draws out the meaningfulness of ownership, touch and nostalgia, all influential ingredients of the self. This research centers on interviews with 19 former readers of a weekly newspaper that shuttered. The findings illustrate the significance, usefulness and uniqueness of the printed newspaper. In particular, participants expressed a relationship with the printed newspaper, calling it "my paper." Ultimately, this research argues that the loss of the weekly newspaper prompted a loss or lessening of self of the abandoned readers. Finally, this article argues this "print imprint" extends beyond printed newspapers and should be considered for all print products, including magazines and books, pointing to future research possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The valorization of newspaper waste through adsorption-driven processes using activated carbon presents a promising avenue for sustainable waste management. This comprehensive review explores the advances and prospects of using activated carbon to enhance the value of newspapers. The fundamental properties of activated carbon, its unique adsorption mechanisms, and its interaction with contaminants commonly found in newspapers, such as ink dyes, heavy metals, and organic pollutants, are also discussed. Applications of activated carbon-treated newspapers span across air and water purification, soil enrichment, and odour control. The paper critically evaluates the environmental benefits of this approach, comparing it with conventional disposal methods. Furthermore, challenges associated with implementing activated carbon-assisted valorization and potential strategies for overcoming them are discussed. Real-world case studies highlight successful projects, shedding light on this innovative waste management solution's economic viability and technological feasibility. This review concludes by emphasizing the role of adsorption-driven valorization in transforming newspaper waste into a valuable resource, addressing environmental concerns, and shaping future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage of and commentary on partisan activities, institutions, and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes over the period 1880 to 1980. We find that, on average, newspapers were initially highly partisan, but gradually became less partisan over time. Importantly, we find as much change after the 1910s as before, which contributes to the existing literature that focuses on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We also investigate words and phrases that had negative or positive partisan connotations in particular periods. Finally, we examine whether some of the common hypotheses offered in the literature can account for the changes. The initial findings suggest that these explanations can only account for part of the decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper is based on a frame analysis of the media portrayal of Syrian refugees in the three highest circulating Canadian newspapers from 2011 to 2022. From 2011 to 2013 the focus was on the conflict being far away, confusing and complicated but not Canada’s concern. From 2014 to 2016, the conflict became urgent to Canadians and their politicians. From 2017 to 2022, as policy changed to actively soliciting refugees to come to Canada, the focus emphasized the inadequacies of resources available to refugees and bureaucratic snafus. There was little reporting about Syrian refugees as people, but when given a voice they were portrayed as grateful and heroic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) frequently experience difficulties in understanding longer written content such as paragraphs or books. Reading strategies are a promising approach to treat text‐level reading comprehension deficits in PWA. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for their efficacy remains rare. Aims: The primary objective of this study was to analyse the efficacy of a strategy‐based intervention on text‐level reading comprehension in PWA. Secondary objectives were to compare the effects of two strategy‐based intervention components and to explore potential moderator effects. Methods & Procedures: A protocol was published prior to data acquisition. In a repeated measures trial, 26 German participants with chronic, post‐stroke aphasia participated in a waiting period without aphasia treatment (control condition) followed by a strategy‐based intervention called 'Strategiebasierte Textverständnis‐Therapie bei Aphasie' (StraTexT, 14 face‐to‐face‐sessions, twice per week, 60 min each). Two strategy combinations, Intervention Micro targeting microstructure and Intervention Macro targeting macrostructure, were applied to newspaper and magazine articles. Participants were randomly allocated to two parallel groups that received these strategy combinations in interchanged sequences. Assessments were implemented before and after each period as well as 3 and 6 months after the intervention. The primary outcome measure was text‐level reading comprehension measured with the total score of a German version of the Test de Compréhension de Textes (TCT‐D). Secondary outcome measures addressed the self‐reported perception of reading abilities, reading activities and feelings about reading (German version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Reading in Aphasia CARA reading questionnaire) as well as selected cognitive functions. Outcomes & Results: The per‐protocol‐analysis included data from 22 participants. We found significant small improvements up to 6 months post‐intervention compared to pre‐intervention in the TCT‐D Total (d = 0.35–0.46) as well as medium to large improvements in the CARA questionnaire (d = 0.68–0.96). Up to 3 months after the intervention, treatment‐induced improvements in the TCT‐D Total were significantly larger than change without treatment during the control condition. There was no evidence of moderator effects. Furthermore, we found improvements in several cognitive functions. Conclusions & Implications: Reading strategies can lead to long‐term improvements in text‐level reading comprehension and in self‐reported reading abilities, feelings about reading and reading activities in aphasia. In regular clinical settings, it seems reasonable to implement both Intervention Micro and Intervention Macro. It remains important to investigate participant characteristics that contribute to treatment success. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject: Systematic reviews and multiple case studies suggest that reading strategies are a promising approach to treat text‐level reading comprehension in aphasia. The efficacy of reading strategies has been demonstrated for different populations. However, to date no group study has evaluated the efficacy of reading strategies on text‐level reading comprehension in people with aphasia. What this study adds: This study provides the first group‐level evidence about the efficacy of a systematic strategy‐based intervention in 22 people with post‐stroke chronic aphasia. During 14 treatment sessions, participants applied four reading strategies to newspaper and magazine articles within two intervention components called Intervention Micro and Intervention Macro (two strategies per intervention component). We found improvements in text‐level reading comprehension for at least 3 months post‐intervention, as well as effects on selected cognitive functions and self‐reported reading abilities, thoughts and feelings about reading and the ability to engage in reading activities. What are the clinical implications of this work?: The strategies and materials evaluated in this study could be used in clinical practice with people with aphasia. In order to replicate treatment effects in clinical practice, we suggest applying the strategy combination with the same protocol features (e.g., frequency, duration, homework, product orientation) as in this study, implementing Intervention Micro and Intervention Macro sequentially in either order. As treatment response was not equal in all individuals, it seems important to investigate individual features that contribute to treatment success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how news images of refugees in the context of the war in Ukraine mobilize intergroup relations. A visual rhetorical analysis is used to examine the rhetorical strategies employed in news images of Ukrainian refugees in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from February 25 to May 31, 2022. The data consisted of 465 images. The study constructed four humanizing visual rhetorical strategies based on the visual expression in news images: maternalizing, fragilizing, agonizing, and activizing. The rhetorical strategies constructed four subject positions for Ukrainian refugees: vulnerable victims, innocent victims, suffering Ukrainians, and persistent/resilient Ukrainians. All rhetorical strategies implicitly communicated the subject position of evil to Russia. The paper contributes to the current knowledge of the humanization of refugees in media discourse and the potential of media images to mobilize intergroup relations. Methodologically, the paper elaborates visual rhetorical analysis as a means of social psychological study of refugee discourse in the context of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to trace both the development of the main media channels throughout the centuries, and their often hard to pin down and define influence upon their consumers. From newspapers to the radio, the TV and nowadays the internet, the media has always directly or indirectly shaped the way people think, feel and act. This is nowhere more visible than in the USA, where especially political life and discourse is inextricably linked to the media and its manifold propagandistic and sometimes manipulative strategies and tendencies. Media has moved in recent decades more and more overtly from delivering a message i.e., information, to creating incentives for purchasing goods (via advertising) or for following a certain political ideology. Last but not least, the present paper addresses the complex issue of the media’s influence on human behavior, especially in the case of young people, with critical voices stating that certain types of media may negatively influence behavior and lead to aggression, violence or obsessive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper depicts a Covid science case, that of the AstraZeneca Vaxzevria vaccine, with specific focus on what happened in Italy. Given that we believe acknowledging the role of non‐evidential factors in medicine is an important insight into the recent philosophy of science, we illustrate how in the case of Vaxzevria, the interplay between facts, values (both epistemic and non‐epistemic) and cognitive biases may have possibly led to different institutional decisions based on the same evidence. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we provide a glossary of the relevant terms involved, that is to say, epistemic values, non‐epistemic values and cognitive biases. Second, we sketch a timeline of Vaxzevria's approvals and suspensions by relevant institutional healthcare authorities with special focus on Italy and the Italian Medicines Agency. Then we show the interplay between the evidence base, epistemic as well as non‐epistemic values and cognitive biases using a narrative review of political decisions along with newspaper and social media content pertaining to Vaxzevria. We briefly compare Italy with other European countries to show that different political decisions were made on the basis of the same evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Brussels in February 1840, Piotr Kopczynski published a series of three newspaper articles that caused a commotion because they took seriously the rumors about bread that caused gastrointestinal problems. Journalists, city administrators, doctors, chemists, bakers, and two health boards reacted to the articles, which led to a controversy that lasted a couple of months. The paper analyzes this episode, paying meticulous attention to the views and doings of all actors. It emphasizes the need to know the chronology of food fears to learn when, how, and why people and institutions react. The Kopczynski affair allows to suggest the phases of food fears, that may go beyond time and place. Sources of the paper include reports, magazines, treatises, and especially newspapers, which are carefully read with consideration not only of what was written but also of how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines newspaper cartels, a largely unoccupied field in media history, from the perspective of longevity. We analyse Finnish newspaper industry from the 1910s to 1970s and show that newspapers sought to regulate various aspects of competition, such as subscription prices, advertisement tariffs, and newsprint prices. Data indicates that political rivalry shaped the newspaper cartel collaboration until late 1950s: the cartel was set up by right-wing and centrist papers and, unlike in other Nordic countries, the Social Democratic press remained outside of the association until 1958. Political shocks of the Finnish Civil War in 1918 and the Second World War also changed the composition of the cartel. The era of private cartels in the newspaper industry gradually started to fade away as a result of anti-cartel laws in the 1960s and governmental anti-inflation measures in the 1970s. We conclude that the economics of newspaper industry and the cartelisation of the wider business environment, newsprint suppliers in particular, encouraged newspapers to co-operate with each other. The results of this article increase the understanding on the collaborative and competitive environment of newspaper companies, but also contributes to broader questions on cartels and their inner dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine Scottish politics in the decade or so following the Second World War. The objective is to uncover the texture of Scottish politics in a period that has been characterised rather simplistically. Much of the evidence for the paper is drawn from the Scottish popular press, most notably newspapers such as the Bulletin, which was a Glasgow publication with a unionist outlook, motivated by a concern to keep Scottish issues to the fore and to resist centralisation. The article will examine the way in which interpretations of this period in Scottish politics, as being one dominated by a unionism that was common to the main parties, serve to flatten what was an interesting and contested landscape. There is a considerable literature on this period in British historiography that engages in a debate about the value of the idea of 'consensus' in British politics. The apparent consensus over the Union hid a range of important debates about the way in which the Union ought to operate that were of such an extent as to bring the idea of a unionist consensus into question. Given that the Scottish National Party was such a marginal force in Scottish politics in this period, it seems more sensible to focus on the debates about the meaning of the Union rather than to adopt an existential focus that was simply not present in day-to-day political debate in the decade following the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family members often cite broader societal discourses and norms when forcing Chinese queer people to engage in heterosexual marriage (referred to as HMQ; heterosexual marriage undertaken by Chinese queer people). It is unclear what these social norms entail and how the norms are maintained. This paper examines 89 Chinese newspaper articles to uncover the societal discourses driving families to pressure queer people into heterosexual marriage. We identified three framings: (1) Highlighting problems of formality marriage (the marriage between two queer people) and gay’s wife marriage (the marriage between a queer man and a heterosexual woman); (2) portraying people involved in formality marriage and gay’s wife marriage as suffering from heteronormative pressure to engage in marriage; and (3) presenting formality marriage in a collaboration frame and gay’s wife marriage in a deception frame. These framings suggest heteronormativity in marriage is upheld in societal discourses about HMQ and sustained by two hierarchies created in Chinese newspaper articles: one degrading queer marriage practices, which made heterosexual marriage undertaken by queer people inferior to ideal heterosexual marriage; another stratifying queer marriage practices, which made the marriage between a queer man and a heterosexual woman less acceptable than the marriage between two queer people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated incidences of domestic violence (DV). The framing of DV within media sources contributes to the public's understanding of DV. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper explores representations of safety within newspapers' reporting of DV during the pandemic. The sample included newspaper articles (n = 31) from U.S. newspapers. The analysis involved multiple rounds of coding and employing "structured questions." These articles depicted limited courses of action for DV survivors and represented safety as unattainable. Safety was constructed in four ways: homes are unsafe, social services are overburdened, government failures, and the elusiveness of safety. These discursive formations provide insight regarding "idealized" social responses to DV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the history of Swedish newspaper carriers through the lens of the union struggles within the Swedish Transport Workers' Union. This focus allows us to make visible the influence of a profession that has largely been overlooked in media history. Mobilizing around working conditions, the workers put pressure on the newspapers in terms of the size and weight of the papers with consequences for the editorial work. There was also a strong stance against commercial advertising and additional supplements that had consequences for the financial situation of newspapers. Hence, through their union struggles newspaper carriers directly influenced the outlook of newspapers in Sweden in the post-war era. In extension, we consider newspaper carriers as soft media infrastructures that had a crucial role and influence on the formation of the Swedish public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is developing a new statistical approach to automatic partitioning of texts into parts belonging to different authors. It is based on the analysis of processes that counts the number of different words forward and backward. The theoretical study of the processes is based on the assumptions of an elementary probability model with a change point. We prove consistence of our statistical estimate of the point of concatenation in the case when the concatenated texts have different Zipf exponents. This method is being tested on the Brown corpus and also on newspaper texts in different languages. Testing shows a good estimate of the concatenation point. This method can be used in parallel with other text segmentation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The terms idiot, imbecile, and moron are generally associated with notions of intelligence, having served both scientific and mundane roles across cultural‐historical contexts and in many different countries. This study seeks to explore the degree to which the use of these terms is an everyday part of our lives and to map out the meanings being attached to them. Methods: This study reports on their current usage in two arenas: within 29 academic papers published from 2016 to 2021, reporting on interviews or observations undertaken in educational contexts; and within 134 articles from four English language newspapers published in the first three months of 2021. Using a discursive and thematic approach to the analysis, it considers the degree to which these may be considered slur or taboo words, and whether they can be linked to discriminatory practices frequently experienced by groups with whom they are associated. Findings: It is evident is that people use the terms differently in different arenas. However, they see them as negative, associate them with stereotypical characteristics, are happy to apply them to others, but want to avoid having them applied to themselves. Conclusion: This study shows how widely these words are used across social contexts, and suggests that as with other historical terms for marginalized populations we need to regard them as slurs and treat them as taboo. Accessible summary: The study looked at the use of the words Idiot, Moron and Imbecile in 29 academic papers and 134 Newspaper articles.The terms were used by a many different people involved in education and in the news media.These three words are used to belittle others and people do not wish to have them used about themselves.Idiot, imbecile and moron are recognised as disapproving words, but they also act as slurs and so perhaps they ought to be forbidden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a highly contested illness. This paper analyzes the discursive production of knowledge about, and recognition of ME/CFS. By mobilizing insights from social epistemology and epistemic injustice studies, this paper reveals how actors, through their social-discursive practices, attribute to establishing, sustaining, and disregarding their own and others' epistemological position. In focusing on the case of the Dutch newspaper reporting about ME/CFS, this paper shows that the debate about this condition predominantly revolves around the ways in which people who make truth claims are represented. In being portrayed as gendered, affectatious, formerly very able, fanatical, or benevolent, people with ME/CFS are constructed as non-/credible. In the debate about what causes ME/CFS, by contrast, the production of non-/credible knowledge focuses more on the content of epistemic positions. Actors in this debate argue that they know the (clear) causes for the illness, something which functions as a discursive strategy to establish and enhance their credibility. This paper contends, however, that since this discursive demarcation of causes is consistently infused with uncertainty – with multi-interpretability, with diffuse explanations, and absence of current knowledge – the credibility of these actors' epistemic position is undercut rather than established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers the first sustained exploration of a group of transfer drawings made by Robert Rauschenberg in 1958, a crucial moment in the artist's long and influential career. The discussion is grounded in the discovery of Rauschenberg's newspaper source material, which points to striking yet undisclosed patterns of reference within the works, enabling new interpretations and richer forms of connection to the historical moment of their production. Perhaps more important, they also reveal a striking temporal compression: in one drawing, for example, every transfer was made from newspapers published on a single day. This aligns the drawings not just with the legible content of the newspaper but also with its temporal logic. The article explores Rauschenberg's embrace of contingency, his appeal to and subversion of reading habits proper to the papers, and the role of intermittence and fragmentation in the work, alongside his motivated engagement with specific political themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on content analyses of 175 newspaper articles about repealing the ban on American women serving on the front lines of combat, this paper explores how news media portrayed military women. Historically, media depicted women in war as damsels in distress, yet after a decade of women's service in blurred front lines, media had ample opportunities to frame women differently. The news media have a powerful role in reinforcing or challenging hegemonic masculinity when presenting women as warriors. Using an intersectional lens, this paper finds that news media portray women as legitimate warriors; however, media do not discuss military women's race, ethnicity, sexuality, or family roles, rendering women as one-dimensional. Implications of one-dimensional representations of military women make diversity indiscernible and reinforces the double-bind, which upholds hegemonic masculinity and limits women's career potential both within the military and the labor force, more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain's so-called "quality" newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or "other" transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both "pro-trans" and "anti-trans" articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either "progressive" or "conservative". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of Partition have focused upon the bitterly polarized yet vibrant public sphere of the last days of the British Raj, wherein newspapers representing Congress, Muslim League and Akali opinion vied for influence through increasingly hostile propaganda targeted at the 'other/s'. Such studies' focus on ideological battles and propaganda results in relatively less attention being given to what became of these papers once the British departed and the parties these papers espoused or opposed captured power. This paper will seek to revisit such assumptions by analyzing the trials and tribulations of the significant newspaper houses unfortunate enough to be located on the geographical frontlines of Partition and in major centres of communal conflagration. Through such analyses, I will seek to show that it was a combination of initial mob action, reinforced often by state repression and even popular reproach, that forced newspapers viewed as belonging to the 'other' party to move to safer (and greener) pastures. In the process, late-colonial India's once pluralist public sphere came to be partitioned into sections that broadly conformed to the ideologies that the respective Dominions' new rulers espoused. While aligning newspapers with the majoritarian public opinion, this Partition occasioned shifts of personnel and presses that would fundamentally alter the postcolonial press industry in West and East Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing theoretic inspiration from the spatial turn within humanities, this article attempts to develop methods for studying placemaking in news media. This is done by a case study of the newspaper Þjóðviljinn, published in Ísafjörður, Iceland, in the late nineteenth century. The concept 'banal placemaking' is suggested for the kinds of spatial conceptions that occur in the paper without the explicit aim of creating an image of a place. When reading the paper in this way, a multitude of places and counter-places occur in the text. The town is contrasted with the countryside, the region with Reykjavík, and Iceland with Denmark. Icelandic spatial conceptions changed with urbanization and the coming of new regional centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do media discourses on German national identity differ before and after the arrival of refugees in 2015/16? National identity discourses are often closely linked to immigration dynamics, inter alia due to boundary making through the othering of immigrants. While this relation is well documented in the case of Germany, scholars have yet to study how the arrival of refugees in 2015/16 has been integrated in discourses on national identity in more detail. In this paper, we conduct an inductive qualitative content analysis of Die ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild am Sonntag in 2014 and 2019 and find an important shift within the media representation of German national identity. While in 2014, a self-understanding of Germany as an immigration country dominated the media landscape, by 2019, national identity discourses became more fragmented and neither the idea of a tolerant Germany nor the idea of an anti-immigration Germany clearly dominated. Based on this analysis, we argue that 2015/16 can be understood as a turning point for discourses on German national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we attempt to determine the sources of original information on earthquakes among newspapers published in Russia in 1809–1819. It is revealed that the information presented in periodicals was not used to the full extent in compiling the main historical catalogs of earthquakes in Russia. Paradoxically, instead of the original reports from Russian newspapers, often greatly abridged and distorted information was cited from translated versions and European newspapers, as well as from descriptive catalogs of earthquakes compiled in Paris and London. It is shown that in Russia there were several communication channels for transmitting messages from distant localities to the center. Not all incoming information was published; some of it ended up in the archives, usually as reports to the authorities. Some information remained in personal correspondence. Therefore, research on historical seismicity cannot be limited to searching for information in newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to identify user perception of different qualities of optical character recognition (OCR) in texts. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different quality OCR on users' subjective perception through an interactive information retrieval task with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on the simulated work task model used in interactive information retrieval. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869–1918 which consists of ca. 1.45 million autosegmented articles. The article search database had two versions of each article with different quality OCR. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formulated short queries and evaluated subjectively the top 10 results using a graded relevance scale of 0–3. Users were not informed about the OCR quality differences of the otherwise identical articles. Findings: The main result of the study is that improved OCR quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper articles positively: higher relevance scores are given to better-quality texts. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this simulated interactive work task experiment is the first one showing empirically that users' subjective relevance assessments are affected by a change in the quality of an optically read text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the analysis of the discourse in major Israeli ultra-Orthodox newspapers during the first year of COVID-19. Following Durkheim, we argue that the pandemic not only brought about a health emergency, but also a state of anomie. Analyzing both Hamodia and Yated Neeman—both major news outlets of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel—we show how in a time of anomie when the sanctity of life (pikuach nefesh) conflicted with the sanctity of the community, the latter prevailed. Thus, this study unveils a different set of moral priorities than the one commonly referred to in Israeli bioethical discussions in the pre-COVID-19 era. We also found that the Durkheimian "totem" or "God" metaphors—a symbol of society itself—are highly relevant in analyzing how leaders of the Haredi community in Israel tried to keep their congregation together. This was expressed in the two heavily censored newspapers we analyzed: they placed communal living above the sanctity of individual life in a way that exposed how the cohesion of the group and the community itself were sanctified. At the same time, what was identified as the real virus was in fact secularism and not COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediocrity as a concept in education has frequently been used by modern-day and historical actors to express discontent with the status quo of pedagogy and schooling. Despite its pervasiveness in discourse, however, the concept has largely evaded academic scrutiny, particularly in terms of its historical development in the years leading up to its appearance in the famous United States Government report, A Nation at Risk. This paper aims to construct a conceptual history of mediocrity in American education through the analysis of newspaper articles from The New York Times, to explore how the concept developed amidst the rise of neoliberalism and meritocratic discourse in education. This study finds that the concept of mediocrity between 1971 and 1983 had a number of nuanced conceptualisations and played a pivotal role in developing meritocratic discourse on natural talent and ability, as well as neoliberal and marketised narratives in public debates over educational equality, business approaches to education, and performance pay for teachers. These findings allow educational researchers to reflect meaningfully on the ways that language shapes, and is shaped by, historical developments in education, and provides layers of meaning and context to oft-used educational concepts that are crucial for the authentic evaluation of our modern education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the result of an exploratory research about Mapuche women's writings between 1935 and 1965 available in Mapuche newspapers, as well as in educational institutions and journals of social movements. The goals of this research are to review the historical elements that allow the emergence of the women's prose, and to break down the central aspects of these writings, specifically, the relationship with civil rights, the demand for education and the fight against racism. The article arises from a study carried out in press archives in the National Library of Chile and documents in the Gabriela Mistral Museum of Education, as well as brief research in the Regional Archive of Araucanía. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an overview of specific characteristics of newspaper output and publishing trends in Latvia, aiming to assess whether the newspaper output in Latvia plays the roles theoretically ascribed to newspapers, namely, the roles related to democracy and community building. It is argued that media pluralism is crucial for executing these roles. The assessment of pluralism is based on an exploratory analysis of quantitative data on newspaper output in Latvia. The analysis is accompanied by a discussion of challenges experienced in the newspaper publishing field in Latvia and elsewhere that can potentially hinder the ability of newspapers to execute the roles theoretically ascribed to them. Finally, insights gained during the research process are shared regarding research required to further the analysis of newspaper output in terms of plurality in the sense of access to different news sources and, by extension, perspectives and public representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting on crime and the courts are among the classic functions of journalism. In the UK, journalists and others must abide by the Contempt of Court Act 1981, the main piece of primary legislation aimed at ensuring coverage of legal matters is fair to the participants. The restrictions are generally tighter in practice than in jurisdictions such as the US, where the media has a much freer hand to engage in pre-trial reporting. This paper argues that media coverage of the arrest of the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper' serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, in 1981 while Parliament was considering the question of contempt, has made the UK regime tougher than it might otherwise have been. Excessive reporting was influenced by an unusually celebratory police news conference. This news coverage coloured the contemporary debate around contempt, and any opportunity for a more relaxed approach to contempt in the UK's jurisdictions was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reveal how the local media, Kedaulatan Rakyat, produces discourse on the Yogyakarta palace's internal conflict involving Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X and his siblings. The Special Region of Yogyakarta as a province in Indonesia has a special government system that is different from other regions. The governor of Yogyakarta is not elected by the people like in other regions in Indonesia but is determined by the DPRD based on who serves as the King of the Yogyakarta Palace. This phenomenon becomes interesting when there are differences of opinion among the people and within the Yogyakarta Palace regarding the acceptance of women leaders. The conflict began to arise when Sultan Hamengku Buwono X issued the Sabda Tama and Sabda Raja (Sabda Raja) which were interpreted as the Sultan's way to pave the way for his daughter to become heir to the throne. The Sultan's younger siblings opposed the female king to rule in Yogyakarta, so an internal conflict arose. The research method used is a qualitative method with a critical discourse analysis approach using the Norman Fairclough model to analyze news texts related to the Yogyakarta Palace's internal conflict from the Kedaulatan Rakyat Daily. From the results of the research, it was found that the Kedaulatan Rakyat Daily produced discourses on internal conflict in the Yogyakarta palace by representing the ideology and interests of Sultan HB X's younger siblings. This local daily newspaper also commodified internal conflict in the Yogyakarta palace as events that were produced and disseminated to the public for the benefits media economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals' trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First, political trust, an attitude known for its stability, increased following lockdown. Second, consumption of mainstream news on COVID-19 directly hindered this increase, with those reading more news having lower over-time trust, while the relatively minor alternative news consumption had no direct effect on political trust. Third, threat perceptions a) to health and b) from the policy response to the pandemic, have strong and opposite effects on political trust, with threats to health increasing trust, and threats from the government policy response decreasing it. Lastly, these threat perceptions condition the effect of COVID-19 news consumption on political trust: perceptions of threat had the power to both exacerbate and mute the effect of media consumption on government trust during the pandemic. Notably, we show that the expected negative effect of alternative news on political trust only exists for those who did not think COVID-19 posed a threat to their health, while public service news consumption reduced the negative effect produced by government threat perceptions. The paper therefore advances our understanding of the nuanced nature of media effects, particularly as relates to alternative media, especially during moments of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the last two decades have seen a concerted effort to understand the role and place of African journalism in covering events on the continent, there has been little focus on who journalists chose to quote as sources in their stories. This despite scholarship on sources being vital to our understanding of how journalists gain the "raw materials" to produce stories about events. Thus, while scholarship has begun taking Africa's coverage of itself seriously, there has been a slower uptick in focusing on whom African journalists give voice to as co-constructors of events. This silence is even more perplexing, considering that scholars and observers have been critical of who is quoted as a source when the global north covers events unfolding in Africa. This paper shows that African suffering was made legible for African audiences through a combination of American, English, and Sudanese voices. Specifically, it finds that African journalists are –counterintuitively - vital players in silencing some African voices in their construction of knowledge about the atrocities in Darfur. Despite the criticism leveled at journalism fields in the global north over their perceived silencing of African voices, African journalists are similarly engaged in this silencing as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines code-switching as a language style of Yoruba newspapers, within the larger context of the day-to-day speech mannerisms of Nigerians. This linguistic mode is a result of culture mix and has encroached on the indigenous languages of the peoples, and the style (of the writings) of indigenous language media. The paper analyses the texts of Alaroye newspaper to demonstrate the phenomenon. Questions raised concerned the purpose of code-switching, as well as its effects on Yoruba language and influence on respondents' interest in reading Alaroye. Survey and content analysis were the research designs used, while purposive sampling was preferred for the selection of seventy-five respondents to the questionnaire and six who were interviewed. Findings show that code-switching simplifies, aids comprehension, increases interest in indigenous language newspapers and accommodates the bilingualism of readers. Respondents agree that code-switching contributes to the linguistic half-caste mode of journalism and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an important contribution to comparative research by examining data journalism in Spain and Austria. This paper examines the practice of data journalism from a triple perspective: (a) the common features of day-to-day work, (b) the organizational structure and the role of the teams in newsrooms, and (c) the obstacles to and the future of data-driven reporting. Results from content analysis of data-driven news stories in El país and Der standard (N = 136) show differences and similarities in the covered topics, sources, narrative style, visualizations, interactive functions, and levels of transparency. Interestingly, only 36.8% of the analyzed news stories correspond to the normative expectations of transparency by incorporating both sources and methodological details. While the Spanish newspaper shows significantly higher levels of transparency compared with the Austrian newspaper, both newspapers perform very similarly when it comes to providing access to raw data, which was the case in only every fifth news story analyzed. Findings from focused interviews with the heads of data journalism teams deliver interesting insights into specific challenges that each news outlet is facing when creating day-to-day data-driven news stories. This research confirms the relevance that data journalism has achieved in countries such as Spain and demonstrates the effort of journalists in countries without access to information and transparency laws to create data-driven stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing selected Slovene newspapers, the article discusses the role of slivovitz in the reproduction of everyday nationalism in interwar Yugoslavia. The article is based on an analysis of texts containing the word slivovka (the Slovene word for slivovitz or plum spirit) that appeared in three major Slovene newspapers and three minor Slovene pro-Yugoslav newspapers in the period 1919–1945. In the period in question, slivovitz did not (yet) have the role of a signifier of the Yugoslav state, the Yugoslav nation and other elements associated with Yugoslav identity, but it was becoming part of the "structure of national feeling" – the specific experience of life in a given time and place that was common to the Yugoslav nation. Slivovitz, frequently included in repetitive and everyday habits, practices and assumptions, began to define the Yugoslav nation through a specific culture of drinking and drinks and became a component of this everyday, largely unnoticed reproduction of the Yugoslav nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangladesh has a long history of newspapers dating back to British colonial times. Bangladeshi newspapers have long been used as a reliable data source for mass media and interdisciplinary research. This paper examines the terrain of research based on Bangladeshi newspapers. A bibliometric investigation was implemented after searching for research items based on Bangladeshi newspapers using the Web of Science database. We then analysed the chosen data using the Bibliometric R packages. In total, 35 documents have been retrieved and examined over the past 20 years. The study found that research papers accounted for 77.14% (n = 27) of the retrieved materials. Authors from research institutes in Bangladesh produced most of the publications (45.71%; n = 16), followed by Germany (11.4%; n = 4) and Australia (8.5%; n = 3). The main areas of research were predominantly media, health, and education. Dhaka University was the most active research institution (20%; n = 7). Research using Bangladeshi papers has appeared in Health Communication, BMC Public Health, Child Abuse Review, and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. Content analysis, speech analysis, and framing are the most commonly used research methods. This article presents evidence of how Bangladeshi newspapers were used as a source of research. Moreover, it reveals the top researchers, institutions, and areas that used newspaper data as sources, along with other findings. The paper will help researchers understand the current state of research on how newspapers are used as a source of research and will offer directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand how the news in newspapers referring to the Workers’ Party (PT) in Ponta Grossa in the 1980s can be understood through Sentiment Analysis. In this sense, the journalistic publications of a certain spatial and temporal cut are analyzed, with the use of opinion mining techniques applying artificial intelligence to decipher aspects of natural language. We used the Syuzhet package included in Rbase, through the Rstudio interface, where we could verify that the positive emotions and feelings transmitted by the news published during the time under analysis, contributed to the electoral adhesion to the PT, electing members in the legislative and executive branches of the municipal government, a situation that had its share of influence in later decades in other spheres of the State. In this paper we try to make clear the path taken to reach our results, allowing the methodology to be applied to other printed periodicals and other themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates migrant representation patterns according to media political orientation, analyzing the coverage of key-events by liberal/conservative online newspapers of France, Greece, Italy, UK. From our textual and visual analysis, it is possible to recognize slight specificities between liberals and conservatives, but not indicative of a deep change of narratives. In both, we registered a prevalence of the "acceptance frame", an infrequent use of negative tones in texts and aesthetic topic in images, among the "topics of suffering" by Boltanski. Moreover, a domesticity approach limiting the possibility of new narratives of Europe and the rest of the world emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to study the effect of genre on borrowing. A recent study with data from libraries in libraries in the Helsinki region showed that the purchase price, critics in newspapers, hardcover sales and the author's publication history have an impact on borrowing from public libraries impact of genre on borrowing is unclear when other variables affecting borrowing have been controlled. Moreover, the country of birth or the country of residence in some cases of the author is included in the analysis. It is well known that Nordic Noir genre has been rather popular among readers. This study uses conventional regression analysis to combine the effects of various explanatory variables and therefore widen the knowledge on the effect of genre on borrowing. The results indicate that borrowing a novel and purchasing a novel are substitutes since the retail price has a significant positive effect on borrowings, however, the price elasticity is small. Critics reviews in newspapers and weekly magazines and journals are important, so any public knowledge about the book is of great worth. This article studied public library borrowings from libraries in the libraries in the Helsinki region, especially novels for adult citizens. There is a nice list of the 100 most borrowed books each quarter from early 2014 to summer 2021. The total number of quarters is 30 and the total number of observations is 3000 having many novels appearing in more than one top list. The total number of different novels is 727 in the sample. About 60 % of the novels are listed to the top 100 most borrowed list one, two or three quarters. All books have a declining borrowing demand with time, the demand is highest during the launching period. The genre of the novel does not seem to be an important factor in borrowing from public libraries when other determinants have been controlled. Retail price has a positive effect on borrowings, more expensive books seem to be more borrowed and library customers seem to be willing to wait to be able to borrow the novel and they do not purchase the novel. The positive price elasticity is small but still significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an ongoing research project which aims to map the everyday musical life of Pest-Buda and outlines the structure of the public musical events of the city. It offers an explanation of the reunion as a concert genre in a regional context. The paper details the background, operation and structure of the musical life of the city based on the analysis of three daily newspapers, the Budapesti Hírlap, the Hölgyfutár and the Pesth-Ofner Lokalblatt und Landbote. More than 5,000 articles relating to the public musical life of the cities appeared in the pages of these newspapers in the 1857 issues alone. The structure of the public concert life of Pest-Buda, based on this microhistorical research, can be divided into the following categories: concerts, opera and musical theatre performances, church music, promenade concerts and promenade music, music performances in cafés and restaurants, balls and dances. From these categories, special attention has been given to the reunion genre, trying to define it more precisely based on existing re search (Kálmán Isoz) and on new research on the period’s press material as well as archival musical sources (Eins für Alles. Großes Potpourri by Karl Morelli). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]