compass a greater percentage of the Canadian population (ie, Chinese Canadians at 3.7% of the population), newspapers serving these audiences were
largely written in languages other than
English. Mainstream newspapers were
purposefully matched to publication
sites of the ethnic minority newspapers.
To be included in the analysis, mainstream papers had to have the highest
subscription for a given province, be
available at the National Library of Canada, and had to be written in English.
After applying these inclusion criteria,
seven mainstream and 25 ethnic minority (6 Jewish, 14 First Nations, 3 Black/
Caribbean, 2 East Indian) newspapers
were selected for analysis. This sampling
strategy is further described in Hoffman-Goetz, Shannon, and Clarke.29
The target audience and description of
the newspapers are found in Table 1.
The 32 publications were searched
manually for all cancer articles published in 2000. Articles were identified
as cancer articles if the title and/or first
or last paragraph included the terms
cancer, tumor, or neoplasm. Each article
was classified as a general or a site-specific cancer article, and cancer sites were
coded according to the major common
cancers identified by the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute.30 The number of cancer articles
was reported as the absolute number of
cancer articles and as the number of
cancer articles per 1000 pages to account for differences in newspaper sizes.
Each article was coded for date of
publication, page number, section, article length, authorship (wire service, staff
reporter, freelance writer, not specified),
mobilizing information (inclusion of a
health/cancer organization’s contact information [telephone number, address,
or website] for further informationseeking opportunities by individuals after having read the article), and mention
of ethnic minority group (Jewish, First
Nations, Black/Caribbean, East Indian,
‘‘Canadian’’ [mainstream]). The total
number of cancer articles in ethnic mi-