Investigating News Deserts on the Content Level: Geographical Diversity in Swiss News Media

Author:

Vogler Daniel,Weston Morley,Udris Linards

Abstract

With its diverse landscape of regional and local news media, Switzerland seems far from being a news desert. However, the centralization of editorial offices following the economic crisis of journalism has led to news outlets that share most of their content but appear under different names in different regions. This development has fostered fears about declining geographical diversity at the regional level in the news coverage of Swiss news media. We argue that this centralization by regional news outlets affects news content; it constitutes a specific process of news desertification, which is not aptly captured by news desert research’s focus at the outlet level. With our explorative study, we aim to analyze news deserts at the content level. We apply an automated geoparser to a manually annotated dataset of local news media articles (<em>n</em> = 5,173) published by six regional news outlets of two news organizations between 2016 and 2021 to determine the extent and development of geographical diversity in Swiss regional news media. The geoparser uses a weighted gazetteer-based approach to determine the most relevant locations of news articles within Switzerland. We find early signs of news desertification. At the output level, we observe a declining number of articles published by the analyzed outlets. At the performance level, we see a declining number of unique place names in the articles and more mentions per article. However, the diversity of place names in the coverage remains stable.

Publisher

Cogitatio

Subject

Communication

Cited by 2 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3