News Diversity Research Articles

Promoting active aging in Brazil: A longitudinal study of land use mix and utilitarian walking in older adults

Despite walking being common among older adults, international evidence suggests its prevalence is lower compared to other age groups. Land use mix (LUM) is believed to encourage walking, but in the context of Brazilian and other Latin American cities, empirical evidence for this association for older age groups is lacking. Moreover, existing studies for this cohort usually employ a cross-sectional design, weakening the robustness of conclusions. This study addresses these gaps by investigating the impact of LUM on utilitarian walking in Brazil using a longitudinal approach with 566 older adults. Logistic regression analyses reveal significant positive associations between walking and two LUM measures (entropy and objective NEWS diversity), indicating that land use diversity plays a crucial role beyond local accessibility and non-residential availability, even within the context of Brazilian cities. Therefore, the attractiveness of walking for transportation among older adults can be amplified through a combination of diverse amenities, closer proximity to residential areas, and an equitable distribution of land uses coupled with more locally integrated street layouts that allow easy access to nearby surroundings. Practical steps include participatory local street design and development planning to enable grid intensification, avoidance of monofunctional zones and planning incentives for multifunctional developments.

Does News Diversity Work Among Audiences? A Citizen Experiment

ABSTRACT Scholarly and policy debates alike frequently highlight the normative value of news diversity as a necessary prerequisite for journalism to optimally fulfil its watchdog function in democratic societies. Various studies have sought to conceptualise news diversity and/or to operationalise it from the vantage point of journalists and newsrooms as news content producers. However, very little remains known about how news diversity is received and perceived by audiences. In this paper, we outline an audience experiment carried out among Flemish (Belgian) adult citizens (N = 208) to examine whether enhanced viewpoint diversity in news content affects its perceived diversity and credibility. Using news content focusing on one controversial and one more politically moderate topic to assess differences in the perception of news content diversity, we find that high viewpoint diversity is observed by audiences whereas low viewpoint diversity is not. Moreover, news articles with only one viewpoint that matched their own were perceived as more credible. We conclude that researchers and policymakers can only advance the ongoing important debate on news diversity if they choose to pay more attention to how audiences (don’t) engage with it.

The effects of incidental news exposure on social media on Chinese youth: News diversity and online expression

Chinese youths––the “mobile internet generation”––are increasingly exposed to news incidentally through mobile social media. Based on the theory of incidental news exposure and semi-structured interviews with 41 Chinese youths, this study inductively explored the effects of incidental news exposure on news diversity and expression on social media from an audience-centered perspective. The results question previous findings of positive impacts of incidental news exposure on democratization, evidencing potential negative effects of incidental news exposure on news diversity and civic expression. This paper indicates possible reasons for those effects, highlighting the influence of citizens’ trust in official information sources and the social media censorship environment in China.

“But then the war started”: The value of diversity in editorial practices during times of war and crisis

In this article, we analyse the impact of disruptive media events on the perceived value of diversity in editorial practices, with a specific focus on the Polish media debate following the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war in February 2022. We do this based on a unique dataset derived from in-depth interviews with eight editors representing four different newsrooms conducted before, immediately after, and approximately one year after the start of the war. Our research answers the question of whether newsrooms can defend the value of diversity during the coverage of war and crisis. We also assess the impact of the changed geopolitical context, characterised by nation-building mobilisation and public sentiments of solidarity with Ukrainians, on editorial decisions to mute, delay, or opt out of publishing certain stories. We contribute to research on the epistemologies of journalistic news production during times of crisis, news diversity, and the role of the media in democratic societies.

Media Consolidation and News Content Diversity: A Deductive Framing Analysis of Belgian Refugee News Coverage

ABSTRACT Growing groups of scholars express fears that rising media ownership consolidation negatively affects news content diversity. Existing research has mainly focused on quantitative studies, thereby somewhat neglecting the qualitative component. To fill this gap in scholarship, we combine news content homogeneity studies with framing analysis to assess how discourse in reporting related to the refugee crisis changed across four newspapers from Belgium (Flanders) between 2010, 2015 and 2020, a time during which they all underwent major ownership changes. Our findings suggest limited effects of ownership concentration on frames and discourse, indicating a more nuanced picture among alarmist findings. We do argue, however, that media concentration and the increased collaborations between newsrooms of the same parent company can do more harm than good. We position our findings within the specificalities of the Flemish media market as well as international research, both from a news (content) diversity and a framing studies vantage point.

Global news diversity in perspective

Interview

How does a national, multilingual news agency contribute to news diversity? A mixed-methods case study

News agencies are regularly mentioned in scholarly works among the principal sources of information for legacy news organisations and titles, particularly in the 24/7 online news environment. However, little is known about how these agencies themselves source news. To fill this gap in scholarship, we present a case study of how Belgium’s national, multilingual news agency sources its science news. We first position our study within a conceptual framework combining insights from news diversity and translation studies research. Next, we operationalise a triangulation of a content analysis, a survey, and interviews with newsroom staff to shed light on the practices and policies that shape and constrain the inner workings of a national news agency in a small, multilingual media market. Our findings reveal a large, potentially worrying, dependency on information subsidies and their assumed factuality from press releases and other news agencies, largely sourced locally. We contextualise our findings within wider news agency and science journalism research.

News Nationalization in a Digital Age: An Examination of How Local Protests Are Covered and Curated Online

News outlets are increasingly nationalizing their presentation of news stories, framing and presenting local news in a broad national context. We investigate how supply-side and curation-side factors of the news cycle contribute to the nationalization of news coverage. Through the computational analysis of 1.05 million Google news results on four days in July–August 2020, that corresponded to 1,581 news stories published on the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, we examine the relationship between the nationalization of news coverage, stories’ search rank in Google News, and the geographic distance between the news event and the stories’ reading audience. Further, we explore the role of Google News in curating locally focused news. Our findings help to map the media ecosystem in a digital age, highlighting the influence of algorithmic power in politics and showing that excessive circulation of national news may have a profound negative impact on news diversity and social justice.

Paying for News Diversity? A Topic Diversity Analysis of Free and Paywalled Online News

ABSTRACT Media companies increasingly place (parts of) their online news content behind to compensate for shrinking digital advertising revenues. However, despite its prominence in the contemporary news environment, very few studies have assessed the effects of this practice on the diversity in the actual content provided to people. To fill this knowledge gap in scholarship, this study examines how diverse free and paid content is in several newspapers in Flanders (Belgium). Using a topic classification model and quantitative analysis of 287,856 online news articles, we differentiate between paywalled and non-paywalled articles, popular and quality news brands, two distinct media corporations and two diversity benchmarks: open and reflective diversity. Our findings reveal that in most cases, online news content behind paywalls is indeed more diverse, although the differences with freely available articles are often minimal. We also find that quality news titles do not necessarily score higher on topic diversity than their popular counterparts. These findings are contextualised within the Flemish media market as well as existing scholarship.

Newspaper Ownership, Democracy and News Diversity: A Quantitative Content Homogeneity Study

ABSTRACT Scholarship is recognising that news diversity is jeopardised by heightened media ownership consolidation and a lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Using an automated quantitative content analysis of 658,493 articles published between 2018 and 2021 by two newspapers of the same recently emerged Belgian corporation that had to comply with stipulations to safeguard diversity for five years, we find that while overall content has actually not grown more homogenous, tabloid articles risk crowding out broadsheet news. We ultimately position and contextualise our study and its findings within news diversity and democratic theory and offer suggestions for additional research.

МЕДИАРАЗНООБРАЗИЕ В АЛГОРИТМИЧЕСКИХ СРЕДАХ: ХАРАКТЕР ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ И ФАКТОРЫ ИЗМЕНЧИВОСТИ

The problem of maintaining media diversity, as an important condition for the quality of the news sphere and for civic awareness, becomes relevant in the context of the algorithmicization of news and the dominance of "digital intermediaries". The latter are gaining discursive power, partially taking over the gatekeeping function from traditional journalism. Using the example of news aggregators as influential "secondary gatekeepers", the dynamics of quantitative and qualitative manifestations of media diversity they create are defined. Three common conceptualizations of media diversity serve as the theoretical basis. The author proceeds from the standard of open diversity. The evaluation of news diversity is made according to the parameters of variability, proportionality and balance. The dynamics of the following parameters were revealed: types of media (ownership, ideological position, national affiliation); the presence of a critical message; the nature of the sources used. The following trends were detected: a bias toward the dominance of state-owned media, an increase in the weight of state-owned news agencies, a decrease in the share of opposition publications, rejection of the practice of aggregating of foreign news media. The share of critical materials and "non-elite" sources of information has decreased. The results show the risks of news depletion in algorithmically curated environments, mainly under the influence of state media policy.

Exploring the link between media concentration and news content diversity using automated text analysis

In this article, we explore the relationship between increased media market concentration and its effects on the diversity of news content. We assemble a dataset of 1,419,479 print and online ‘hard news’ articles published between 2018 and 2021 by the four largest newspapers in Flanders (Belgium). These include two popular and two quality titles owned by two rival media companies, which only emerged in recent years after a string of mergers and takeovers which fundamentally changed ownership diversity in the small yet increasingly concentrated Flemish media market. In our analysis, we compare articles for their similarity between titles belonging to the same company using automated text comparisons. We find that content is growing increasingly similar and expand the existing body of research on the link between media concentration and news (content) diversity in Flanders as well as beyond.

Algorithmic News Diversity and Democratic Theory: Adding Agonism to the Mix

The role news recommenders can play in stimulating news diversity is receiving increasing amounts of attention. Democratic theory plays an important role in this debate because it helps explain why news diversity is important and which kinds of news diversity should be pursued. In this article, I observe that the current literature on news recommenders and news diversity largely draws on a narrow set of theories of liberal and deliberative democracy. Another strand of democratic theory often referred to as ‘agonism’ is often ignored. This, I argue, is a mistake. Liberal and deliberative theories of democracy focus on the question of how political disagreements and conflicts can be resolved in a rational and legitimate manner. Agonism, to the contrary, stresses the ineradicability of conflict and the need to make conflict productive. This difference in thinking about the purpose of democratic politics can also lead to new ways of thinking about the value of news diversity and role algorithmic news recommenders should play in promoting it. The overall aim of the article is (re)introduce agonistic theory to the news recommender context and to argue that agonism deserves more serious attention.

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

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.

How Alternative Are Alternative Media? Analyzing Speaker and Topic Diversity in Mainstream and Alternative Online Outlets

Alternative outlets can differ in their degree of partisanship, activism, and their opposition to a perceived news “mainstream.” We expect this could lead to diverging contributions to overall news diversity. We assess how mainstream-like, partisan and activist media differ from mainstream reporting concerning migration and refugee policy in Germany. We combine a manual analysis of speaker diversity in 12 mainstream and alternative outlets (N = 1,172 articles) with a computational topic model (N = 34,819 articles) covering 30 outlets to assess topic diversity. Interestingly, we find no significant differences between mainstream and alternative outlets regarding overall speaker diversity. But our data show differences in which parties get cited, and whether outlets focus on experts, civil society speakers, or migrants themselves. While mainstream media offer higher overall topic diversity, alternative media split along the lines of agenda accommodation and more independent agendas of partisan and activist media.

Nudging towards news diversity: A theoretical framework for facilitating diverse news consumption through recommender design

Growing concern about the democratic impact of automatically curated news platforms urges us to reconsider how such platforms should be designed. We propose a theoretical framework for personalised diversity nudges that can stimulate diverse news consumption on the individual level. To examine potential benefits and limitations of existing diversity nudges, we conduct an interdisciplinary literature review that synthesises theoretical work on news selection mechanisms with hands-on tools and implementations from the fields of computer science and recommender systems. Based thereupon, we propose five diversity nudges that researchers and practitioners can build on. We provide a theoretical motivation of why, when and for whom such nudges could be effective, critically reflect on their potential backfire effects and the need for algorithmic transparency, and sketch out a research agenda for diversity-aware news recommender design. Thereby, we develop concrete, theoretically grounded avenues towards facilitating diverse news consumption on algorithmically curated platforms.

Normative or Effective? The Role of News Diversity and Trust in News Recommendation Services

In recent years, online news portals have initiated the use of algorithms to recommend news. The purpose of this study was to determine how the perceived personalization of Naver News users affects continuance intention through the mediation of trust, user satisfaction, and perceived usefulness. Moreover, this study investigated how the perceived news diversity affects continuance intention through the mediation of user satisfaction and perceived usefulness, using data collected from 451 participants in South Korea. Research findings revealed that perceived personalization had a positive effect on continuance intention through the mediation of trust, user satisfaction, and perceived usefulness. Furthermore, perceived news diversity had a positive effect on continuance intention through the mediation of user satisfaction, a finding that has not been outlined in previous studies. This study also shares several practical implications that might be of interest to news aggregators and portals toward increasing their users’ trust, and satisfaction.

Google News and Machine Gatekeepers: Algorithmic Personalisation and News Diversity in Online News Search

Through a mixed methods research design, we address normative aspects of news recommendation engines by examining whether search personalisation and news diversity are evident on Google News in the UK. First, in a quasi-experimental design, we asked a diverse set of participants (N = 78) to search Google News using four search terms and report the first five articles recommended for each term. We found little evidence of news personalisation, which challenges the claim that news search algorithms contribute to weakened viewpoint diversity. We also found a high degree of homogeneity in news search results, with legacy media brands dominating. Second, we conducted a manual content analysis of the articles recommended by Google News for our search terms (N = 192), focusing on favourability towards each term. We found that while there was little relationship between the favourability slant of the articles and political leanings of participants, there were two exceptions: self-identified right-wing participants were more likely to see unfavourable stories about 1) immigration, and 2) a left-wing politician. This reopens the question of news search engines’ contributions to polarisation and viewpoint diversity for certain news consumers.

Operationalising news diversity: A comparison of Norway and Flanders

Operationalising news diversity: A comparison of Norway and Flanders

Assessing News Content Diversity in Flanders: An Empirical Study at DPG Media

ABSTRACT In this paper, we outline a content analysis of 541,083 national and international news articles, all published between 2018 and 2020 in the print and online versions of the two newspapers of the biggest private media company in Flanders (Belgium). Through automated text analysis, we assess articles for their internal content overlap, which has been linked by scholarship to possible negative effects of increased media market consolidation. Results reveal that while the overall content overlap between the two newspapers has remained stable, one of the two titles has copy-pasted articles from the other one increasingly, while also recycling content more frequently across its own newspaper and website. These findings are positioned in Flanders’ small and highly concentrated media market and subsequently contextualised in a broader perspective of news diversity within media markets and societies.