*Per Shraddha Chakradar
From Alden Global Capital to Sinclair Media, stories of corporate takeovers of local news outlets — and all their effects — are everywhere. A new study published in the journal New Media & Society proves the devastating consequences of corporatism.
The study authors looked at a sample of 31 company-owned newspapers and 130,000 articles published by these outlets before and after they were sold.
The publications they examined ranged from Denver Post (which was purchased by Alden Capital in 2010), New York Daily News (initially purchased in 2017 by Tribuna Publishing and acquired 4 years later by Alden), LA Weekly (acquired by Weekly Media LLC in 2017), and 28 California newspapers that were purchased by Digital First Media (also purchased by Alden).
Here is an overview of what was found in the study:
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- The acquisition leads to a significant but not disproportionate decrease in the volume of local content produced by newspapers;
- Coverage of local places in post-acquisition periods is significantly more concentrated than pre-acquisition coverage;
- Articles produced to be shared at regional centers are significantly less local – and more national – than articles exclusive to a particular newspaper.
While these changes were not unexpected for the study authors, there were some surprises. “What was most shocking to me is that all the acquisitions immediately led to changes in personnel and also an immediate drop in content”he said Benjamin Le Bruna graduate student in the language department at McGill University and the first author of the study.
Changes in decreasing local content varied across newspapers.
In Denver, for example, although the number of articles dealing with local content increased briefly in the 2 years following the acquisition of Denver Post in 2010, from the high point in 2012 to 2018, there was a 68% reduction in the number of articles related to local content published in the newspaper.
even with the New York Daily News it’s the LA Weekly — an alternative newspaper in Los Angeles — there was no significant decrease in local content after the acquisition, but rather a reduction in the absolute number of local stories produced.
That was a surprise for Andrew Pipersenior author of the article. “I was a little surprised that the ratio didn’t really change”said Piper, a professor in the department of languages, literature and culture at McGill University. “In other words, the newsrooms that remain still divide their attention between local, national and regional news, so whoever left keeps the ship afloat.”
To measure how the concentration of local coverage has changed—in other words, whether local news continues to cover cities and towns within a newspaper’s coverage area, or whether it has become more focused on major centers. They then measured the mention of different places on a weekly basis and compared the calculations weekly over time.
At the LA Weekly, mention of the rest of LA County outside the City of Los Angeles had a greater impact after the acquisition (news mentioning international events, the rest of California, or other states also declined). At the New York Daily News, coverage changed from other New York state cities, which reduced after the sale. At the Denver Postthe coverage of the State of Colorado and other parts of the country were the ones that reduced the most.
Finally, the researchers analyzed how national news coverage at the local level matches coverage by other national outlets, including Fox News and CNN, after the corporate acquisitions. They used the learning to assess how similar sets of words were also used at the local level that assimilated to the discourse of national vehicles.
To daily news it’s the LA Weeklythere was no post-acquisition similarity of the newspapers, and the vehicles were – in the case of LA Weekly – different from the national vehicles after the acquisition.
How Denver Post, however, the researchers identified an increase in speech similarity after corporate ownership. in the newspaper network Digital First Media in California—because articles in this journal were often shared on the Internet—the common articles were more often national in nature than specific articles from individual publications.
While these findings are not new, they confirm what was expected, according to the authors. One of the reasons for conducting the study “It was really about translating these intuitions that we all had about how what was going on, and introducing on a larger scale [e] begin to answer potentially more complex questions about what is going on.”.
About next steps and more complex questions: “The next step would be to understand, in content, what is changing?”Piper said. “We still don’t know the consequences”.
What does this mean for the future of local journalism, and especially for the corporate ownership trend? “An alternative model is absolutely necessary,” said Piper. “These acquisitions are critical to empty newsrooms, which means they are not considered a financial model of ownership and management of local news.”
And even though Piper admits she doesn’t have a good answer for what that alternative model would look like, “given what we’re seeing with the data, we absolutely need another way to conceptualize how this local news will be produced, distributed and supported.”
*Sraddha Chakradhar is deputy editor of Nieman Lab. A science journalist by training, Shraddha most recently worked at the health news website STAT, where he wrote their award-winning daily newsletter, Morning Rounds. She has previously served as a news editor for Nature Medicine and as a researcher for the PBS documentary science program NOVA.
The text was translated by Natalia Veloso. Read the original text at English.
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