This article critically assesses the effects of media mergers on news diversity at Mediahuis, one of the leading players in the media market of the Belgian region of Flanders. The founding of Mediahuis (in 2013) has led to an extremely concentrated Flemish newspaper market, as it owns and publishes four of the seven daily newspapers. We conducted ethnographic research inside the newsroom of Het Nieuwsblad, Mediahuis’ biggest newspaper, and assess the editorial independence, the changes journalists face on a daily basis due to ongoing digitalization, changing roles and values both within and beyond journalism, and the effect of the merger on the media management of what is now Mediahuis. We also performed an in-depth news diversity study in which we analysed over 3000 newspaper articles appearing in 2013 and 2018 in the four papers. Using this mixed method approach of combining ethnographic research and content analyses, the global results of this study reveal that while the editorial independence has been fairly well maintained, there has been a drastic increase in the number of articles being recycled across newspapers. Overall, over half of all articles produced for four of the seven Flemish newspapers are recycled in at least two of the four Mediahuis newspapers on a daily basis, with an increase from 36 to 51 per cent between 2013 and 2018. This practice has been facilitated by lowering the total number of working journalists, and sharing a content management system which facilitates copy-pasting articles across newspapers and websites.
News diversity is increasingly gaining momentum and relevance in academic research, but quantifying and qualifying the term remains problematic. This paper presents the results of a structured meta-synthesis literature review, in which all relevant publications dealing explicitly with news diversity, media diversity or content diversity of the 21st century found on Scopus ( n = 61) are coded and analysed. Findings reveal that studies dealing with these concepts are on the rise in absolute numbers, but also that their theoretical foundations predominantly still lie in the 1990s. From the viewpoint that said foundations have become inadequate to study and understand news diversity in the digital era, we propose an integrated conceptual framework, model and definition to operationalise news diversity, which takes into consideration recent changes in journalism as media concentration dynamics and changing patterns in news production and consumption. It does so by developing a typology of five categories of diversity (ownership, brand, production, content, consumption) and presenting three levels from which news diversity can be studied (the macro level of the media market, the meso level of the media company and the micro level of the media brand). Ultimately, the paper proposes the adoption of mixed methods research to reveal more about the characteristics, contexts and constraints within any media market.
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