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Are People Reading Local News? A Content Analysis Of Popular News Stories On Nine Newspaper Websites, Peter Shiang Chen

Master's Theses

The news industry has come under tremendous pressure in the last decade. None more so than the newspaper industry, which has seen all aspects of its operation: readership, revenue, staff, distribution and reputation decline dramatically. This study uses content analysis to examine the reading habits of news consumers from nine newspaper-based websites from the Advance Publishing chain. The samples were the stories in the “most popular this hour” list, examined every 5 days from August to September, 2014. These stories were separated into categories such as news, sports, business, etc., and further coded based on their proximity to the news …