Southern Newswires: A Large-Scale Study of Mid-Century Wire Content Beyond the Front Page

TL;DR

This study constructs a comprehensive corpus of mid-20th-century Southern newspaper wire articles, utilizing OCR and LLM-based correction to enable detailed analysis of news coverage, editorial differences, and framing across multiple wire services.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale, multi-source corpus of historical wire articles with OCR correction, capturing full newspaper content beyond front pages for in-depth analysis.

Findings

Insights into editorial differences across wire services

Analysis of language framing in Southern newspapers

Enhanced OCR text quality for historical text analysis

Abstract

This paper describes the construction of a large-scale corpus of historical wire articles from U.S. Southern newspapers, spanning 1960-1975 and covering multiple wire services (e.g., Associated Press, United Press International, Newspaper Enterprise Association). Unlike prior work that focuses primarily on front-page content, the corpus captures wire-sourced articles across the entire newspaper, offering broader insight into mid-century Southern news coverage. The analysis incorporates both raw OCR text and a version processed through an LLM-based text correction pipeline designed to reduce OCR noise and improve suitability for quantitative text analysis. Multiple versions of the same wire dispatch are retained, allowing for the study of editorial differences in language and framing across newspapers. Articles are classified by wire service, enabling comparative analysis of editorial patterns across agencies. Together, these features provide a detailed perspective on how Southern newspapers transmitted national and international news during a transformative period in American history.