Content Diversity in Online News: Comparing Different Types of Ownership

• In Event: Still the Marketplace of Ideas? Studying Diversity of News Content in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The mass media are expected to include viewpoints from different parts of society because it creates a pluralist marketplace of ideas that serves the normative goal of democratic representation. However, different types of media ownership realize this ideal to a varying degrees. Especially corporate or publicly traded organizations are more oriented toward commercial-utilitarian than democratic-normative goals in their news reporting. Several authors found that media companies with these ownership structures produce less hard news and more shallow content that emphasizes emotionalization or negativity.
Against this background, this paper investigates the extent to which different types of online media organizations report political news in a diverse manner with regard to actors, topics, and geographical regions. For this purpose, 48 online news providers from six different countries (CH, DE, FR, GB, IT; US) were analyzed; the country choice accounts different degrees of journalistic professionalization which affects news reporting (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). The chosen media outlets represent different types of ownership that vary systematically in their revenue structures and are assumed to have different amounts of resources available. The sample includes news sites of public broadcasters, private broadcasters, independent newspapers, corporate newspapers, popular news media, and web-based outlets.
The findings suggest that a strong commercialization of mass media diminishes the diversity of news reporting across different media systems. Large profit-oriented corporations avoid this resource-intensive form of coverage and instead focus on one-sided news that features the similar topics, actors, and geographical regions. On the other hand, publicly owned media as well as web-only outlets which often rely on alternative funding models are able to produce diverse news. The former may do so because of their commitment to the public interest, the latter due to independence from profit-oriented holdings. This leads to the conclusion that sufficiently available resources are not the only prerequisite for diversity but must be combined with an additional factor: an editorial mission committed to the public interest.

Authors

• Frank Esser, U of Zurich

• Edda Humprecht, U of Zurich - IPMZ