| Summary: | Health in general, and illness in particular, are prominent topics for discussion in the field of journalism studies. In this paper, we briefly present the research project “Illness in the news” and we share its first results, drawn from an empirical study. Our corpus integrated 800 texts centered on illness and that were published in 2008 by two Portuguese quality newspapers: Expresso (weekly); Público (daily). Data will be explored and examined using univariate descriptive statistic measures, in particular frequency distributions and, when justified, central tendency and dispersion measures. We emphasize the illness that collected the highest number of references (published texts): cancer. Location and moment of the events, journalistic genre, newsworthiness, news framing and news sources are the variables that guide our content analysis. When it comes to news sources, we are interested in examining their place of origin, sex, profession and, in the case of doctors, their medical expertise.
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