ABSTRACT
The systematic analysis of media coverage of social issues, events and actors has long been a central component of both communications research and of sociology, linguistics and related disciplines. Traditionally, such analysis has been marred by the costly, and sometimes tedious, nature of large scale content analysis. Perhaps most frustrating is the effort, time and money spent on identifying relevant coverage (e.g. newspaper articles or television/radio programmes). Also frustrating is the energy that needs to go into the manual coding of relatively basic dimensions (such as time, place and size identifiers) of media texts before progressing to the coding and analysis of more complex and interesting dimensions (such as topic, thematic emphasis and inflection, vocabulary, ideological positions).
