A content analysis of employee publication content at the Mid-American Conference universities during the year 2000

Many researchers agree that the best employee publications offer job and company-related information in an honest and timely manner. The challenge of balancing the mission of the organization and providing objective analysis of issues and events on campus also falls in the editor of university internal publications. The objectives of this study were to analyze the content of thirteen university employee publications and determine what type of content their employees were receiving and whether those non-profit organizations provide content that is similar to findings in previous research on for-profit organizations.The current research was a content analysis of employee publications at thirteen Mid-American Conference universities during the year 2000. Each publication was analyzed using two methods. First, each story or piece of content was categorized according to Click's (1967) established categories for employee publication content. Next, the researcher placed each content piece into one of two categories: issue-oriented or event-oriented content, based on research by Ryan and Owen (1976).Publications produced by the Mid-American Conference Universities provided significantly more employee content, 58 percent, than company/university content, 27 percent, supporting the first hypothesis. Findings from the current research were similar to the original research by Click (1967) in many ways. Results showed that the ranks of corporate publication content and university publication content are similar. Publications used for this study produced significantly more event-oriented content, 91.5 percent, than issue-oriented content, 8.5 percent, which supported the second hypothesis.Department of JournalismThesis (M.A.