Bad News Sells: The Demand for News Magazines and the Tone of Their Covers

Abstract

News media are often believed to focus on negative events as a means to increase their audience and profits. This study evaluates whether this conjecture applies in the case of the 3 German news magazines Der Spiegel, Stern, and Focus in the period from 1997 to 2009. Based on detailed content analyses of issues with political and economic cover stories, the results indicate significant, positive correlations between explicitly negative cover pages and the magazines' sales, after controlling for a comprehensive set of other success drivers and influences.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Gaelike P. Conring, Marlen Dittmann, Alexander Kempe, Jonathan Pfenning, Anne K. Tausch, and Benjamin Trocha for their excellent research assistance.

Notes

¹ Actor-related negativity refers to individuals, groups, or institutions. Often, it can be identified by objective criteria. In contrast, frames neither relate to specific actors or issues, nor are they restricted to objective characteristics and events. Frames can be identified by analyzing the narrative structure of a report (Lengauer et al., 2012).

² We also tested variables with information about sunshine and daylight duration. However, we decided to exclude these variables to avoid problems with multicollinearity, because of the variables' high correlation with the temperature and precipitation measures.