Media Studies Editing and Proofreading Services

A study of how a controversy was covered analyses two hundred articles. They came from a database search on a keyword, in four national outlets, over eight weeks, in English. Every one of those choices excluded something — local coverage, broadcast, the outlets that used a different word for the same thing, the six months before the story became a story. The findings are about that corpus, and the paper talks about the media.

We edit what media and communication researchers write — content and discourse analyses, audience and reception studies, platform and algorithmic research, journalism studies, film and television analysis, political communication work, computational text analysis, and theses, articles and funding applications. Our editors work on the corpus and how it was assembled.

The corpus is the boundary of what a media study can say, and the failure is a sample described by its size rather than by its construction. Two hundred articles is a number; how they were selected is the finding's actual scope. We work through these so the search is reported reproducibly — the database, the exact query, the date range, the language and the date the search was run, since databases change their holdings and a search is not repeatable without them; so the outlets are listed with why those, because four national titles are a specific and non-neutral slice of a media environment; so the terms used to build the corpus are examined for what they exclude, given that any controversy is described differently by different sides and a keyword usually belongs to one of them; so the time window is justified against the phenomenon rather than the researcher's convenience, as the period before something becomes news is often where the interesting material sits; so what was excluded is counted and characterised rather than filtered silently; so the unit of analysis is defined — article, paragraph, utterance or segment — and the coding scheme reported with its reliability; and so the conclusion names the corpus rather than "the media". Studies written this way can be replicated and extended.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, coding frames and interview material. We are editors rather than media researchers, and we offer no view on coverage, interpretation or platform behaviour. What we can do is make the corpus construction visible.