Increased coverage of cancer stories in Black newspapers leads to a displacement of disparity-framed health stories

Black newspapers are an important source of health information for African Americans. While media intervention studies have shown the ability to increase cancer coverage in Black newspapers, this increased coverage may also have an unintentional effect. Greater coverage may displace stories on other health topics if the space allocated for all health stories, or newshole, remains constant. We conducted a four-year content analysis of health stories in 24 Black newspapers. We then examined the coverage of various health topics following a newspaper intervention to increase cancer coverage. We identified 9,545 health stories. Results found that coverage of specific health topics significantly differed from pre- to post-intervention among newspapers in the intervention group (p<.001). Cancer coverage increased from 14.3% of all health stories pre-intervention to 16.9% post-intervention, with no change in the amount of total health coverage (the newshole for health stories) from pre- to post-intervention (p=.369). Displacement was observed in the coverage of health disparities (4.4% to 2.5%), HIV/AIDS (10.3% to 9.5%), and drugs and alcohol (7.4% to 4.6%), along with an increase in health care administration and policy (10.3% to 14.6%). One possible explanation is that the media intervention supplied newspapers with “progress”-framed cancer articles, which may have decreased the frequency of “disparity”-framed health stories and increased the number of stories with a more positive tone. These preliminary findings suggest that newspapers became less interested in disparity-framed stories and support results of prior studies that indicate a preference by African Americans for progress-framed cancer stories.