Is the world getting flatter? A new method for examining structural trends in the news

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new method to analyze structural changes in networks over time and examine how the representation of the world in two leading newspapers, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, has changed during the past 50 years. We construct international networks based on the co‐occurrences of country names in news items and trace changes in their distribution of centrality over time. Supporting previous studies, our findings indicate a consistent gap between the most central and the least central countries over the years, with the United States remaining at the center of the network and African countries at its peripheries. Surprisingly, the most dynamic changes in the past 50 years occurred in what we call the “middle range”. In both outlets, we identified a trend of convergence, in other words, a more equal centrality of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries in the news. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Visible and invisible countries: News flow theory revised

“…This decision to strictly focus on country names and not include nationalities was based on the fact that it would complicate the translation process due to divergent grammatical rules in different languages. Previous studies (Segev, 2010;Segev and Blondheim, 2013a;Segev, Sheafer and Shenhav, 2013), however, show that focusing on country names in a high volume of news items provides a very good proxy of the actual attention a country gives to another in its news outlets.…”

Measuring international relations in social media conversations

“…Network analysis has been widely used in academic studies of international relations and cross-cultural communication (see Barnett & Park, 2005, 2014Chang, Himelboim, & Dong, 2009;Kim & Barnett, 2000;Kim & Barnett, 2007;Rosen, Barnett, & Kim, 2011;Segev, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2013;Park, Barnett, & Chung, 2011). In addition, network analysis has been used in the public sector to bridge the gap between practice and planning (Guhaa & Chakrabartib, 2014).…”

Capturing the change in topical interests of personas over time

“…Therefore, developing personalized content systems requires not only detecting and tracking current interests but also predicting what content users would be interested in the future (Mele, Bahrainian, & Crestani, 2019) or at least what related future content (Toraman & Can, 2017) a person might prefer. Although content producing organizations naturally attempt to do this, studies on online news have shown that most news content focuses on consistent themes (i.e., United States, Western Europe), although this is undergoing a change with shifts in news content to Middle Eastern, and Asian countries (Segev, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2013).…”