Coverage of Robin Williams' Suicide in Australian Newspapers

Abstract

Background: Australia s Mindframe guidelines provide media professionals with advice on ways to safely report on suicide. Aims: We aimed to examine the extent to which Australian newspaper articles on Robin Williams suicide conformed to the Mindframe recommendations. Method: We searched Factiva for relevant articles appearing in Australian newspapers during the 5 months following Williams death on August 11, 2014. We retrieved the text of these articles from Factiva and, wherever possible, sourced scanned copies from the National Library of Australia. Trained coders rated the articles for quality, using a 10-item coding framework derived from the Mindframe guidelines. Results: Our search yie..