TY - JOUR
T1 - Telling a Different Story
T2 - A Longitudinal Investigation of News Diversity in Four Countries
AU - de Vries, Erik
AU - Vliegenthart, Rens
AU - Walgrave, Stefaan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/10/26
Y1 - 2022/10/26
N2 - News diversity is an important concern of journalism scholars, as its presence or absence can have a profound effect on democratic debate and the information available to citizens. Many have speculated that news diversity decreases over time, due to changing economic circumstances. This expectation especially applies to newspapers. Using nearly two decades of newspaper data from four European countries (Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, UK), we do not find this expected decrease in news diversity. When conducting pairwise, automated comparisons between articles published on the same day in the same country, we rather find a modest over time increase in diversity between newspapers. This result suggests that newspapers differentiate rather than converge in the content they offer, shedding a more positive light on the evolution of the press in our current high-choice media environments.
AB - News diversity is an important concern of journalism scholars, as its presence or absence can have a profound effect on democratic debate and the information available to citizens. Many have speculated that news diversity decreases over time, due to changing economic circumstances. This expectation especially applies to newspapers. Using nearly two decades of newspaper data from four European countries (Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, UK), we do not find this expected decrease in news diversity. When conducting pairwise, automated comparisons between articles published on the same day in the same country, we rather find a modest over time increase in diversity between newspapers. This result suggests that newspapers differentiate rather than converge in the content they offer, shedding a more positive light on the evolution of the press in our current high-choice media environments.
KW - comparative research
KW - computational text analysis
KW - content analysis
KW - framing
KW - News diversity
KW - political journalism
UR - https://osf.io/3hdk4/
UR - https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20773187
U2 - 10.1080/1461670X.2022.2111323
DO - 10.1080/1461670X.2022.2111323
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85138012284
VL - 23
SP - 1721
EP - 1739
JO - Journalism Studies
JF - Journalism Studies
SN - 1461-670X
IS - 14
ER -