Development of the PRINTQUAL-Web Tool for Assessing the Quality of Online News Reporting of Suicide

Background: Suicide prevention strategies internationally recommend promoting responsible media reporting of suicide to reduce negative impacts on population suicides. Existing tools to assess the quality of suicide reporting do not capture specific harmful features of the online setting. We aimed to adapt PRINTQUAL, a tool for assessing newspaper reporting of suicide, for online news reports. Methods: We identified all online news reports about the 2020 suicide of a British female television celebrity over a 14-month period and used content analysis to identify features of poor-quality and good-quality reporting based on media guidelines on suicide reporting. We gained expert consensus on items to include negative/poor-quality and positive/good-quality subscales for the new tool: PRINTQUAL-web. Weightings were calculated using an expert judgement ranking exercise. Results: Content analysis of 342 online articles published from 15/02/20 to 05/04/21 identified 18 items for a proposed negative/poor-quality subscale and four items for a positive/good-quality subscale, gaining consensus on inclusion/exclusion and weightings, and rescaling scores for easier interpretation. Limitations: PRINTQUAL-web does not account for article prominence or quantitative reach (e.g., views or circulation) and relies on a binary agree/disagree rating which may not capture nuance. Conclusions: The PRINTQUAL-web and PRINTQUAL tools assess the quality of online and print reporting of suicide, respectively, with rescaling permitting score comparisons across different corpora of reporting.