Why and how higher media concentration equals lower news diversity – The Mediahuis case

Abstract

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.

Societal impact of university research in the written press: media attention in the context of SIUR and the open science agenda among social scientists in Flanders, Belgium

“…Due to the scarcity of existing figures, it is difficult to qualify the 2526 individual instances wherein named social scientists appeared in Flemish written press outlets in 2019, but these figures do point at a habitual presence of at least a fraction of this particular research community in domestic newspapers and magazines. However, it should be noted that this figure requires some nuance due to the relatively high media concentration in Flanders (Hendrickx & Ranaivoson, 2019 ). As a few conglomerates own various newspapers or magazines, content tends to migrate quickly from an original source to other titles owned by the same holding.…”

Dissecting news diversity: An integrated conceptual framework

“…This makes quantifying news content and distinguishing it from other media content increasingly convoluted. In similar vein, diversity and pluralism are often mixed up, while diversity rather serves as a stepping stone towards and an integral part of pluralism (Doyle, 2002; Hendrickx & Ranaivoson, 2019; Masini and Van Aelst, 2017; Raeijmaekers and Maeseele, 2015; Sjøvaag, 2016), as in order to achieve pluralism as a market, one needs a presence of diversity in various voices and opinions.…”

“…The predominant reason why various terms have become in use to denote, and thereby involuntarily also to obfuscate, the diversity in news reporting, is the host of different scopes of existing research. News, media and content diversity have been studied based on various levels, which include the level of articles (Voakes et al, 1996), media titles within a media market (Boczkowski and de Santos, 2007; Duan and Miller, 2019; Rau et al, 2008; Sup Park, 2014), media titles within a media group within a media market (Hendrickx & Ranaivoson, 2019; Sjøvaag, 2014) media markets as a whole (Beckers et al, 2019; Lee, 2007; Rasul and Proffitt, 2013; Sjøvaag and Pedersen, 2018) and across various media markets at once (Humprecht and Büchel, 2013; Masini et al, 2018). In spite of different incentives, motivations and methods, all these articles intended to study news diversity within a specific area, and sometimes on a specific topic too.…”

Fragmentation, homogenisation or segmentation? A diary study into the diversity of news consumption in a high-choice media environment

“…One way that is particularly relevant in the context of diversity are the possibilities offered by digitalisation to generate economies of scale and scope by duplicating content (Champion, 2015). It has been documented, for example, that pressures to increase productivity encourage a digitally facilitated copy-and-paste type of journalism (Hendrickx and Ranaivoson, 2019;Van Hout and Van Leuven, 2016). Although research on the topic has become less popular than that on fragmentation, it is more than likely that homogenisation tendencies are still at play today.…”