publications

BMSG's issue series

Voices for change: A taxonomy of public communications campaigns and their evaluation challenges [pdf]

Friday, November 01, 2002

The Communications Consortium Media Center in Washington DC commissioned this paper as part of a collaborative project designed to research, develop, test, and disseminate principles for evaluating nonprofit communications. The paper profiles various strategic communication campaigns that differ in purpose, scope, and maturity to identify the evaluation challenges each presents in its messy real-world context.

Youth violence stories focus on events, not causes

Sunday, September 01, 2002

A content analysis of three major California newspapers shows that routine coverage about youth crimes fails to provide context to help readers make sense of such events. This context should include the contributions to violent behavior that poverty, inadequate schools, discrimination, abuse, easy access to weapons, the over-commercialization of liquor, and other environmental factors make. Unreported, these elements have less chance of being understood and remedied.

Issue 12: American values and the news about children’s health

Thursday, August 01, 2002

The term “values” often acts as political shorthand, usually for the political agenda of social conservatives. Yet values systems are crucial to any political culture. How competing American value systems of individualism and what we call interconnection are represented in news stories will influence readers’ interpretations of the stories. The news about children’s health provides a useful lens for analyzing American values in the news since both conservative and progressive voices claim to “leave no child behind.”

Issue 11: Silent revolution: How U.S. newspapers portray child care

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

In an information economy dependent on education, child care brims with news value. But an analysis of national news on child care shows that is far from the case. Issue 11 compares every story about child care published on the business pages of 11 newspapers in 1999 and 2000 to child care stories in other parts of the same newspapers to see not only how frequent coverage is, but also how the stories are framed and who gets quoted the most within them.

Reporting on violence: New ideas for print, television and web [pdf]

Monday, October 01, 2001

This reporter’s handbook offers data, resources and suggestions on how to develop data-driven crime and violence stories. We have distributed nearly 1,000 copies to reporters and others in more than 131 news media outlets, journalism programs or affiliated organizations in California and across the country.

Issue 10: Newspaper coverage of childhood nutrition policies

Wednesday, August 01, 2001

Childhood obesity is on the rise, reaching epidemic proportions. Public health advocates have many mechanisms to arrest this trend, but are they getting the attention of policy makers through the news? To find out, Issue 10 analyzes two years of news coverage on childhood nutrition issues in California’s major newspapers.

Reporting on violence: Bringing a public health perspective into the newsroom

Wednesday, August 01, 2001

This case study documents how journalists can be meaningfully engaged on this topic with people from public health despite typical barriers to access faced by public health practitioners and solid resistance from many editors and reporters. The authors describe goals, objectives, and activities across five daily newspapers along with journalists’ reactions, concerns, and resistance to the issues raised.

Off balance: Youth, race & crime in the news [pdf]

Sunday, April 01, 2001

This report assesses findings from content analyses on crime news, investigating whether news coverage reflects actual crime trends; how news coverage depicts minorities and crime; and whether news coverage disproportionately depicts minority youth as perpetrators.

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