Mapping the European media landscape – Meteor, a curated and community-coded inventory of news sources

Abstract

We present Meteor, a new inventory for European news sources (i.e. EU + UK, CH, NO, IL): https://wp3.opted.eu/ . This inventory will facilitate researchers’ efforts to select sources across platforms and gather related textual data. It contains the names of print and online news sources, social media accounts, news blogs, and alternative news media sources, as well as rich meta-information for each entry (e.g. language, audience size, topical focus, ownership structures, access to full-text archives, secondary data, related research). Meteor accounts for the fuzziness of hybrid media systems through an interlinked knowledge graph. Entries are submitted by researchers, validated, continuously updated, and openly accessible to the public. Our inventory allows users to find various European news sources based on a wide range of criteria, putting scholars in a better position to navigate the European media landscape.

Diversity of News Consumption in a Digital Information Environment

“…Other stakeholders, especially government agencies, need to be involved in this process of facilitating and monitoring data access options for researchers to allow for independent research into important societal issues such as media diversity. This process should also include larger survey providers who thus far have almost exclusively focused on tracking solution rather than building panels with data donation participants -although first steps into building larger data donation panels have been taken 17 A good example of pooling resources for trace data is the media texts open repository (Balluff et al, 2022) or the building of one's own research panels. 18 4 All research software used for this dissertation -whether developed on my own (Loecherbach & Trilling, 2020) or in a larger effort (Araujo et al, 2022) -is openly accessible for other researchers.…”

“…For researchers these results mean that it very much depends on the research interest whether it is worth the effort to go into the long tail of news to avoid biases in the data analysis: If the focus is on aggregate effects, sources as local news and citizen journalism will not play much of a role due to the neglectable 4 118 share of visits. Trying to make lists as exhausting as possible (e.g., Balluff et al, 2022) will serve the research purpose without missing out on too much information. However, when the focus is much more on individual user(group) s, media diets or diversity, results might be distorted when not looking deeper and identifying all these sources that are particular to one or two users in the dataset.…”