The paper Sasha and I have been working on for quite a long time has just been published at the International Journal of Communication PageOneX: New Approaches to Newspaper Front Page Analysis. We hope it provides an useful guide and resource to the field of the newspapers front page analysis.
PageOneX: New Approaches to Newspaper Front Page Analysis
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Pablo Rey-Mazón
Abstract
PageOneX is a Free/Libre and Open Source Software tool that we designed to aid in the coding, analysis, and visualization of newspaper front pages. Communication scholars have long analyzed newspaper front pages, using column inches as an important indicator of mass media attention. In the past, this involved obtaining physical copies of newspapers, coding and measurement by hand, and manual input of measurements into a spreadsheet or database, followed by calculation, analysis, and visualization. PageOneX automates some of these steps, simplifies others, and makes it possible for teams of investigators to conduct shared newspaper front page analysis online. We review scholarship in this area, describe our approach in depth, provide concrete examples of analysis conducted by media scholars using PageOneX, and discuss future directions for research and development.