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Coverage of Poverty by a Nonprofit News Outlet: A Comparative Study

[authors] (2017), 17 pp.
"This qualitative content analysis has examined coverage of poverty-related issues by Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit news organization with a mission of covering public problems, particularly those of disadvantaged people. The first set of coverage constituted the body of stories written on poverty from the organization's founding until the start of a cooperative project. The second set of coverage was the video interviews the organization did in cooperation with the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma to focus on this topic in neighborhoods in nearby Oklahoma City. The analysis of coverage showed that in a very broad sense the coverage was similar in that it, in both cases, addressed socioeconomic issues, poor governance, decreasing social cohesion, and various issues connected with personal behavior. However, as Table 1 showed, the specific topics of coverage differed substantially within these categories while showing some commonalities. For example, coverage that generally related to issues of governance or policy focused more on deep systemic issues such as health care in the earlier coverage. The concerns that emerged from the interviews with residents in the later project were centered more on basic daily concerns such as problems with roads and street lights. Concerns about education were evident in both sets of coverage." (Discussion, page 12)