Stephen J. Tanner

Media coverage of sport for athletes with intellectual disabilities: The 2010 Special Olympics national Games examined

In April 2010, Adelaide hosted the IXth national Special Olympics – a sporting event for athletes with intellectual disabilities. This article explores how the print media covered the Games. In particular, our interest is in the language adopted by reporters to describe the athletes and their performances. We were interested to see whether journalists adopted sporting language in their accounts of performances or, alternatively, adopted language that focused on the individual athletes disability. The article explores a number of issues surrounding media coverage of sport for people with disabilities, including the extent to which media organisations perpetuate stereotypes about disability and whether this, if established, links back to the medias reliance on traditional news values.

Journalism can establish its credentials—all it takes is a little research

The critical difference between the academic and journalism research comes at the beginning. While the academic project is subject to scrutiny and approval by university-based ethics committees, the journalistic project is not subject to the same requirements. However, this should not serve to devalue the journalism relative to the academic alternative. For Journalism to establish its research credentials in academe it needs to do a better job at selling itself: at explaining not just what it does, but how it does it.

The role of special edition editorials in forging and maintaining links between newspapers and the communities they serve

Abstract Successful newspapers manage to carve out a niche for themselves with the communities they seek to represent, often appealing to what they perceive as the particular needs and interests of prospective readers. This is particularly evident in the case of newspapers in rural and regional communities that are in the early stages of development. This paper looks at the development of newspapers in two emerging communities, the Northern Territory and Tasmania’s north-west coast, during the late nineteenth century and explores how they use editorials to build and maintain their relationship with readers, both in their set-up period and during milestone events in their history.