Telling a Different Story: A Longitudinal Investigation of News Diversity in Four Countries

Erik de Vries*, Rens Vliegenthart, Stefaan Walgrave

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1721-1739
Number of pages19
JournalJournalism Studies
Volume23
Issue number14
Early online date1 Sep 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2022

Keywords

  • comparative research
  • computational text analysis
  • content analysis
  • framing
  • News diversity
  • political journalism

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Telling a Different Story: A Longitudinal Investigation of News Diversity in Four Countries'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this