Building a health promotion agenda in local newspapers

This is an analysis of newspaper coverage of breast cancer topics during a community-based health promotion campaign. The 4-year campaign, called the Breast Cancer Screening Campaign (BCSC), was devoted to promoting mammography screening in a Midwestern state. The BCSC included both paid advertising and volunteer-led community interventions that were intended, in part, to increase the flow of information about breast cancer and mammography screening in the local mass media. Findings showed that intervention was positively associated with local newspaper content about breast cancer, but the effects were confined to communities served by weekly newspapers. We discuss the implications of this study for future community-based health promotion campaigns.