Coding frame

The coding frame I have designed allows a thorough investigation of the first set of research questions, which seek to analyse the quantity and quality of Port Talbot news. The quantity of news is relatively simple to categorise and code. The act of coding a story ensured it was counted, but in addition, each story coded was measured in cm, and the size and pagination of the newspaper were also recorded to allow the proportions of Port Talbot news within newspapers containing news about other regional towns to be calculated.

Assessing the quality of news is more difficult, and so several indicators were used in an attempt to operationalize and measure this feature in line with common practice in the field of journalism studies. I coded for: page number (as an indicator of prominence), photograph and who the story was written by (to indicate how resources were allocated and to uncover trends in human resources and the use of user-generated content), the topic (used to examine the proportion of news serving journalistic roles such as scrutiny, representation or community- building), the news trigger (an indicator of the way news is gathered, which illuminates changing practices in the newsroom), and the people directly quoted as sources (a measure of

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whose voice is represented in the media, including the number of people quoted, the status of the sources and their location).

I also address the localness of stories by coding for their geographical focus. Localness is an important indicator of representation and community-building. Each story that appeared in the South Wales Evening Post or Port Talbot Guardian that mentioned Port Talbot or an area within Port Talbot was coded, and the localness of the story analysed. Within the selection criteria, of course, all stories could be said to be local, and so to capture the finer detail of the location, stories that gave equal balance to two locations, or when a significant portion of the story was about one location but with a lesser balance given over to Port Talbot, the concept of an ‘angle’ was introduced, with values including national (UK news), regional (Welsh news), South Wales (the region covered by the South Wales Evening Post, mainly Swansea), County Borough (the region covered by the Neath Port Talbot or West Glamorgan local authority area) had their own values. However stories that were mainly focussed on another location and only included a brief passing mention of a local area, such as a Welsh rugby story that only

mentioned a local area in a score line or a fixture list, were coded separately under the ‘mention’ code.

An important measure of the quality of news is taken to be the amount of resources allocated to a story, and so the prominence of the story within the newspaper (what page it appeared on), whether it was accompanied by photographs, and whether the story was credited to a particular journalist, were all coded, as journalists with bylines are often “the better-paid, more experienced members of editorial teams” (Deacon et al., 2007, p. 45). The topic of the news was also coded, and some of these, such as council, health, political or education stories, link to the concerns of the fourth estate as I discussed in Chapter 3. Conversely, more salacious

topics such as celebrities, and entertainment (an increasingly popular style of reporting which is known as tabloidisation (Gripsrud, 2000)), or some types of crime reporting might be said to be

101 an indicator of journalism that is not necessarily in the public interest (Bondebjerg, 1996, p. 27; Marshall, 2005, p. 28).

A new measure was also introduced for this analysis, which I call ‘news trigger’. This acknowledges similar research into “news hooks” by Jenny Kitzinger and Jacquie Reilly

(Kitzinger & Reilly, 1997), which has also been used in further studies of how and why news is chosen by a journalist to become news, for example:

Each story in our sample was classified in terms of the main reason for its

“newsworthiness” – a category that we call the story’s “news hook”, but which is also sometimes referred to as a news story’s “trigger”. (A. J. Williams, Gajevic, Lewis, & Kitzinger, 2009, p. 18)

However, in this study, the news trigger is not measuring the event or element of the story that made it “newsworthy” – instead it seeks to track the flow of information to journalists, and the way official channels, media management sources, readers, social media, well-publicised local events and other such (public and private) information reach a journalist. To explain this more fully, it is perhaps helpful to describe the nature of newsgathering at the local level.

As editor of the hyper-local Port Talbot Magnet website and newspaper, there are several different ways I am ‘triggered’ to write a story (or publish someone else’s). We operate a central email address, and this receives more than 200 press releases every week, from the local council, the local health board, British Transport Police, the Church of Wales, the press officers of local politicians, entertainment public relations companies and similar organisations. We also receive emails from members of the public who would like us to cover their events or issues and from local sports clubs sending in their match reports. I am also signed up to several online discussion groups (mainly based on Facebook) that are relevant to Port Talbot, from general interest, photography or nostalgia groups, to those set up by specific campaigns, for example those opposing school closures or the campaign against the closure of Junction 41 of the M4

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motorway. We also run our own Facebook page, Port Talbot MagNet News, and our own group, Port Talbot News, which entitles anyone to post their own news story, as well as promoting the news stories we ourselves write – a news exchange point for Port Talbot. I also get out and about, attending public meetings, council meetings, or just chatting to local people. All of these ‘channels’ provide me with opportunities to spot stories, and what I discover can trigger a story to be written – from a neatly packaged press release, to a Facebook thread about a protest meeting, to a chat where I hear complaints about dust from a local building site resulting in a neighbour being hospitalised – all can result in me writing a story.

This variable, then, codes the action or impetus that triggered the journalist to write the story, and seeks to discover whether journalists were overt about attending council meetings, courts and other events traditionally associated with fourth estate journalism (what Lewis et al call “meaningful independent journalistic activity” (2008a, p. 17)), or whether they were

attending managed media events such as launches or press conferences, or indeed whether they were remaining in the office and relying on the “information subsidy” (Gandy, 1982, p. 74) of press releases or writing stories from meeting agendas, minutes or magistrate courts’ lists, which would be an indication of a less active, and potentially less critical or questioning style of journalism (O'Neill & O’Connor, 2008). As Marshall explains, for example, “the press release[…] has been instrumental in shifting the balance of editorial content of newspapers throughout the twentieth century” (Marshall, 2005, p. 24). Part of the aim of this variable is to examine whether journalists were better resourced in past years than they are now to leave their desks, cultivate contacts and actively search out news for their readers. Studies by Franklin et al, Harrison, Lewis et al and others have found that actively produced news is better for democracy than passively reproduced news that is spoon fed to newsdesks or ‘media managed’ by outside agencies and corporations (Franklin, Lewis, & Williams, 2010; Harrison, 2006; Justin Lewis, Williams, et al., 2008b). Studies into the way news is used by other news outlets once it is in the public domain, where journalists are used as “unwilling sources” and their original material is “cannibalised” are also relevant (Phillips, 2011, 2012), and this kind of news was also coded

103 where it was visible. Only where the trigger was explicitly mentioned or when it was obvious from the text was it coded as such, and data collected in this category, as well as any conclusions reached, are expected to be complemented by the data gathered in interviews with journalists.

Finally, the study also coded sources. This was an additional measure of localness, as the geographic location of sources was recorded, but it also captured the number of sources quoted, which gives some indication of the journalistic effort that has gone into the reporting, as well as the time and resources devoted to reporting the story. O’Neill and O’Connor, for example, examined newspapers in the north England to examine how news was shaped by the sources journalists used. They found that the range of sources being used regularly was “narrow”, as that a “reliance on a single source means that alternative views and perspectives relevant to the readership are being overlooked”, concluding: “Journalists are becoming more passive, mere processors of one-sided information or bland copy dictated by sources” (O'Neill & O’Connor, 2008, p. 487). Another study coded sources for their status, affiliation and localness, contending that greater diversity of sources was favourable for a “multiplicity of voices […] necessary for effective self-governance and cultural vitality” (Voakes et al., 1996, p. 582). Another study of the use of citizens as sources noted the lack of “bottom-up”, community-originated stories within traditional local media in the Netherlands, and also that the lack of citizens used as sources in stories meant they did not live up to Fourth Estate ideals:

As for the use of citizens as sources, instead of using citizens in substantial roles as engaged actors who define the public’s news agenda, this remains overwhelmingly restricted to the easy-to-use vox pop format used for illustration and pragmatic reasons. This falls short of meeting the principles of public journalism in which citizen sources are seen as crucial for the contribution they can make to public debate by sharing knowledge or presenting an alternative perspective. (Hermans, Schaap, & Bardoel, 2014)

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Others have noted the inequality in the power balance between journalists and PR sources. Gans argues PR sources often set the agenda, and suggests, “it takes two to tango, but sources usually lead” (Gans, 1979). Others have noted this reliance on government (including local government) and PR sources (for example Harrison, 2006), but research has concluded the growth in the use of PR and agency copy is directly related to falling staff numbers (Davis, 2002, p. 17). Sources and the way they are used are therefore connected with several preoccupations of this research, including representation of local people, localness of news, changing working practices and the implication for scrutiny and fourth estate journalism.

Once the coding was complete, the results were entered into SPSS, apart from the physical measurements of each story, which were entered into an Excel spreadsheet, along with the pagination of each newspaper and the overall page dimensions of the newspapers, in order to calculate the proportion of Port Talbot news being produced within each edition of each newspaper. The coding sheet and coding manual are at Appendix A and Appendix B.