Seminar

Well, I'm back from the seminar, which featured a marvellous election analysis from Mick and my good self talking about media analysis in the break-out session. I didn't have much to report, because we haven't finished coding for our content analysis yet, but the striking thing have found so far is the huge difference between the local papers and the four regional ones (the Belfast Telegraph, the Newsletter, the Daily Ireland and the Irish News) in terms of coverage. The locals were far more likely to deal with issues and policies, with the regionals concentrating on the campaign itself and on personalities. There was a pretty interesting discussion of why this might be (with some consensus that it's rooted in editorial decisions that are themselves driven by budgetary constraints), as well as some critical comments about our methods. All very interesting!