#5 — Professional and Amateur Media on the Academy Awards

I am looking at the difference in writing between professional media (newspapers) and amateur media (blogs) in Oscars coverage. Specifically, I am measuring coreferring expressions and explicit topic openings (Monk et al., 131) in a Times article and a Pajiba post.

My expectation is that, due to the more relaxed and casual nature of a blog, Pajiba will use more coreferring expressions than the Times. Due to fairly strict style guides used by professional journalists, I expect the Times will use more explicit noun phrases to identify its topics. I also expect this result because a blog post is more conversational in that it allows public feedback in the form of comments, so an author will generally not be as concerned with getting their piece exactly right the first time around.

	Coreferring Expressions	Explicit Topic Openings	Ratio (coref/explicit)
Times	24	24	1
Pajiba	10	17	0.588

One of the things I noticed while tallying the results was that coreferent expressions appeared much more frequently in quotes included in the articles. If the marks from quotes were not counted, the numbers were these:

	Coreferring Expressions	Explicit Topic Openings	Ratio (coref/explicit)
Times	16	21	0.761
Pajiba	4	14	0.286

Apparently my expectations were completely misplaced: not only was there a higher concentration of coreferent phrases in the Times, but a larger portion of Pajiba's coreferent phrases came from a quote than did the Times. A possible confusing factor is that while the Times article is centrally about the fight between Brokeback Mountain and Crash for Best Picture, the Pajiba post is a more wide-ranging rant about the awards. So, because the Pajiba post completely changed topic more frequently, more explicit topic identifier were necessary. The Times article, having a more thought-out structure and more overriding theme, had less need for explicit topic openers and could make better use of coreferring expressions.