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Abstract
Scholars and pundits have widely discussed the decline of print journalism, but there has been very little empirical research focussed on examining online alternatives. This article utilizes a unique sample of online local political content related to the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign to address this void. A content analysis of this data set has three objectives: to depict the range of sources of online local political information (LPI) available to Philadelphians; to compare the LPI provided by these various sources; and to determine the amount and provenance of the original LPI that is available on the web. New media sources of LPI may be far from maturity, but this article finds that they do exist and are a viable resource for citizens.
Notes
The total N (278) for analysis is less than the number of pages saved (313) – which, in turn, is less than the total number of unique links included in the Google search results (336). The difference between 313 and 278 is caused by the inclusion, by Google, of some irrelevant pages. The remainder of the missing results were omitted because the pages they led to were no longer accessible online at the time of data collection, despite efforts to be exhaustive and timely.
During the primary season, the searches ran every 15 minutes – until Google blocked them under the assumption that they were an attempt at search engine optimization. Consequently, results for some days in the fourth, fifth, and sixth weeks were lost. Because of this, though the election was held on 15 May, the period of analysis here is set as 1 April through 12 May. During the general election period, the scripts were adjusted to run 24 times a day and were not disrupted.
p-Values for all t-tests reported in this article are two-tailed.