Study of the Framing of Women’s Issues in South West Nigerian Community Newspapers

Community newspapers serve localised readerships and may reflect or challenge dominant narratives about women's roles, rights, and challenges in ways that differ from national press coverage. This study examined how women's issues are framed in community newspapers in South West Nigeria. A content analysis was conducted on 150 articles from six community newspapers in Ogun, Oyo, and Lagos States, focusing on publications from 2022 to 2023. Articles were coded for issue type (health, politics, business, social welfare, crime), framing orientation (agency versus victimhood, positive versus negative), source diversity (women as quoted sources versus subjects of coverage), and editorial stance. Results showed that women were covered primarily in social welfare (32.7 percent) and crime victim contexts (28.0 percent), while business achievement and political leadership coverage together accounted for only 24.0 percent. Victimhood framing predominated in 64.7 percent of articles where women were the primary subjects. Women as quoted sources represented only 29.3 percent of total source citations across the analysed articles. Community newspapers with female editors showed significantly more agency-oriented framing in women's coverage compared to male-edited publications (p < 0.01). The study concludes that community newspapers in South West Nigeria consistently underrepresent women as active civic agents, and recommends gender-responsive editorial training for community newspaper practitioners alongside investment in female editorial leadership as a structural solution to imbalanced framing. Keywords: women's framing, community newspapers, South West Nigeria, gender and media, press representation