Abstract
The power of the press to shape the informational landscape of a population is unparalleled, even now in the era of democratic access to all information outlets. However, it is known that news outlets (particularly more traditional ones) tend to discriminate who they want to reach, and who to leave aside. In this work, we attempt to shed some light on the audience targeting patterns of newspapers, using the Chilean media ecosystem. First, we use the gravity model to analyze geography as a factor in explaining audience reachability. This shows that some newspapers are indeed driven by geographical factors (mostly local news outlets) but some others are not (national-distribution outlets). For those which are not, we use a regression model to study the influence of socioeconomic and political characteristics in news outlets adoption. We conclude that indeed larger, national-distribution news outlets target populations based on these factors, rather than on geography or immediacy.
Highlights
The mass media is one of the social forces with the strongest transformative power
We examine the degree to which different geographic locations in the same regions are covered by existing news outlets using Chilean social media data
5 Results Our primary task in this work is to approximate the distribution of the audience of the online media based on the geopolitical and socioeconomic characteristics of an area
Summary
The mass media is one of the social forces with the strongest transformative power. news reach people unequally. The PM states that each linguistic account of an event must pass through five filters that define what is newsworthy One such filter, the advertising filter (the second in the PM), predicts that outlets will try to cater to a target demographic’s expectations, rather than being fair in their treatment of what is news. According to Zipf ’s Gravity Model [3, 4], as we move farther away from the source of a piece of news, the interest/relevance of a story should drop Their followers should be located predominantly in populations that are closer to them, and the size of a population at a particular place should influence how newspapers cover events originating in that area. News outlets will favor in their coverage issues that may draw the attention of larger groups (e.g., big cities) and where it is cheaper to deliver the news (e.g., at a shorter distance)
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