Abstract
This paper investigates the influence of news agency Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP) on the coverage and diversity of political news in Dutch national newspapers. Using computational text analysis, we analyzed the influence on print newspapers across three years (1996, 2008, and 2013) and compared influence on print and online newspapers in 2013. Results indicate that the influence of ANP on print newspapers only increased slightly. Online newspapers, however, depend heavily on ANP and are highly similar as a result of such dependence. We draw conclusions relating to the gatekeeping role of news agencies in the digital age in general, and in the context of the Netherlands in particular. Additionally, we demonstrate that techniques from the field of information retrieval can be used to perform these analyses on a large scale. Our scripts and instructions are published open-source to stimulate the use of these techniques in communication studies.
Highlights
There is a conundrum regarding the diversity of news in the digital age: in spite of the larger variety of news publishers, there does not appear to be a larger variety of news (Boczkowski and De Santos 2007)
The two-day time-frame was used because we assume that if a newspaper is influenced by a news agency article this happens in the short term—which we demonstrate for online news
In this paper we analyzed the influence of a single news agency, Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP), on political news coverage in print and online newspapers in the Netherlands
Summary
There is a conundrum regarding the diversity of news in the digital age: in spite of the larger variety of news publishers, there does not appear to be a larger variety of news (Boczkowski and De Santos 2007). One of the explanations for this phenomenon is that a large part of the news across a wide range of news publishers can be traced back to the same news agencies, or wire services. News agencies offer news publishers a relatively cheap, reliable, and fast supply of information. This can be a boon for the availability of affordable news content, it restricts the diversity of news in society to the gatekeeping choices of one or several news agencies. The prominent role of news agencies in the contemporary media landscape “raises issues for news diversity and free speech” (Johnston and Forde 2011, 195)
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