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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11866 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11866/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Noise-Robust De-Duplication at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04261/) (2022)
- [American Stories: A Large-Scale Structured Text Dataset of Historical U.S. Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12477/) (2023)
- [Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09490/) (2024)
- [A Massive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17810/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.