North East Newspapers and Children and Young People

March 2007

The purpose of this research is to determine whether the negative perceptions among young people about their own portrayals in the region’s press is borne out in the actual content. It must be highlighted that young people were concerned with their representation across the whole media, and this study is concerned only with newspapers (the time-scale and resources for this piece of research limited the remit of the research to regional newspapers as a source of media stories).

The study has charted editorial content relating to children and young people in North East Regional newspapers over a month. A simple content analysis methodology was used to count the phenomena of different representations of young people in the sample. If we have media texts as our only object of analysis, the conclusions we can make will be relevant only to those texts and not applicable to broader society. Also, textual analysis can give the researcher an understanding of their own responses to a text, but it does not give an understanding how the texts are received by other people in the wider community. Trying to understand this from the texts alone would be speculative. To discover this, a different methodology such as surveying or interviewing should be used. This study can only give us an insight into what sort of stories have appeared in the regions press over a one-month period.

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