Terviseteemade konstrueerimine Eesti ajakirjanduses

Abstract

Health journalism is a part of specialized journalism and it is important because expenses of public money on health are enormous. Thus it is of high interest to the public. The aim of this paper is to map, how health related topics are made newsworthy and are framed in Estonian newspapers and what are the sources that are used to build health journalism. The author is using two Estonian newspapers for that – Postimees and Õhtuleht. The paper first presents the theoretical background of news sourcing, framing and intensive coverage. Later on the author focuses on collecting and analyzing the data from the online versions of two newspapers during a period of one month. The most important thing that the author found was that due to the fact that there are no health—specialized journalists in Estonia, the quality and coverage of relevant health news stories is not very good. Too few sources are used and often they are the same from story to story.