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Abstract
This article examines content homogeneity, understood as the degree to which different media focus on the same stories during a particular news cycle, in Argentina's leading print and online newspapers. It focuses on the role of technical practices across media and over time—during a decade for print and during 24 hours for online. The analysis shows three main patterns of homogenization: (a) an increase in the level of homogeneity in print newspapers tied to their online counterparts' practice of publishing breaking and developing stories during the day, (b) an increase in the level of homogeneity in online newspapers as the day unfolds, and (c) a densely interconnected web of homogeneity across print and online newspapers in 2005. We draw from these findings to make contributions to research on online news and media sociology and to reflect upon the direction and meaning of changes in journalistic form in the current media environment.
Pablo J. Boczkowski would like to acknowledge support he received for this project from Northwestern University's Research Grants Committee and the School of Communication's Innovation Fund. He would also like to give special thanks to his Buenos Aires–based team—Romina Frazzetta, Diego Lopez, Victoria Mansur, and Martin Walter—for idea generation; Shane Greenstein for insights with the research design; Dan O'Keefe for help in data analysis; and Barbie Zelizer for support during the editorial process. Boczkowski benefited as well from comments made by Guillermo Culell, Jim Ettema, Daniel Fernandez Canedo, Marcos Foglia, Marcelo Franco, Dan Gruber, Paul Karoff, Ricardo Kirschbaum, Omar Lavieri, John Lavine, Jorge Katz, Limor Peer, Russ Neuman, Fernan Saguier, Mike Smith, Kathie Sutcliffe, Fred Turner, Jim Webster, Karl Weick, Barry Wellman, and seminar participants at MIT, Northwestern University, Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina, the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, the 2006 Annual Conference on Digital Journalism in Spain, and the 2006 International Workshop on Digital Journalism in Argentina. Finally, both authors would like to acknowledge the valuable research assistance received from Gabriela Cantarero, Marie Silver, and Diego Lopez.
Notes
1. This literature has often not examined content homogeneity and diversity at the story level (CitationNapoli, 1999; CitationVoakes, Kapfer, Kurpious, & Shano-Yeon, 1995).
2. Both Clarín and La Nación have made good progress in their recovery from the 2002 Argentine economic crisis and had an optimistic economic outlook in 2005. No massive layoffs of full-time newsroom staff occurred at either paper after the crisis, partly due to a union-sponsored contract clause that entitles journalists to high severance packages in case of employment termination.
3. We collected data on Infobae.com for online, but not on Diario Infobae for print, since it more realistically represents the situation of the top general interest online and print newspaper spaces.
4. An unscheduled event means one that “occurs unexpectedly; news of it is to be disseminated that day or the day after” (CitationTuchman, 1978, p. 51). A prescheduled event refers to “an occurrence announced for a future date by its convenors; news of it is to be disseminated the day it occurs or the day after” (p. 51). We operationalized urgent dissemination differently for print and online. For print, it meant publication of a story within 24 hours or less once the major events had taken place, and for online within 2 hours or less. We chose the 2-hour window because it reflects the pattern of temporal rotation of most top news stories in the online newspapers we studied during the work hours and because in a concurrent study of content production conducted by the first author in one of the online newspapers examined here, this window was referred to as the ideal “point of maturation” of a hard news story.
5. The vast majority of the stories fell clearly into one of these two categories, but we had three additional ones. The first included editorials, opinion pieces, and columns. Second, we included a special type of soft news that we termed “entertainment prescheduled news with no urgent dissemination.” These kinds of stories mostly cover content from the previous day's television programs. Because they deal with prescheduled events, they did not fit neatly into our definition of soft news, and because their urgency of dissemination is lower than the 2-hour window specified for online hard news, they did not qualify as hard news. Third, we included stories about new products and services offered by each print and/or online newspaper.
6. The preponderance of hard news in the online papers increases as the day unfolds, partly due to a change in the design of Lanacion.com's evening homepage: The editorials on its third column during the morning and afternoon homepages were replaced by search options without stories, thus the nine-story front page added a “row” of stories. To measure the effect of this change in format, we recalculated the level of overlap and the thematic distribution of the overlaps without the three added stories and found that the results showed no significant difference from those reported above. Furthermore, our main metric controls for the number of total overlapped stories.
7. This trend affects Clarín more than La Nación in 1995 and 2000—partly due to the smaller size of Clarín's front pages—but this difference vanishes in 2004 and 2005 (see ).
8. The tests of statistical significance of the differences between proportions were based on the effect size index h—the difference between the arcsine-transformed proportions—and, as appropriate, the harmonic mean of the sample sizes, following CitationCohen's (1988) procedures and tabled critical values.
9. Because we focused on publication during the work week, we analyzed a subsample of onlines evening editions during Monday through Thursday and the following day's print editions.
10. This lower level of anticipation between Clarin.com's evening homepage and La Nación's print front page is related to the discrepancy between the high level of non–public affairs reporting in the former and the much lower level of this kind of content in the latter.