http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2968-6224
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Abstract
Within the context of the ongoing discussion on how the media represents spaces and territories to audiences, this pilot study proposes a methodological approach to investigate how diverse online news sources (national and regional legacy media, local public institutions, hyperlocal and community media, etc.) cover a territory—in this case, Brussels. Through a transversal analysis of the contents produced in 152 news items from as many sources, the paper aims to examine how online media ascribes particular meanings to spaces, which in the end might affect audiences’ perceptions. To assess how Brussels and its municipalities are represented, positive and negative values are assigned to news items describing its social problems. Results show that the complexity of Brussels’s institutional structure is an issue for the Belgian media, which has difficulty describing the territory it covers. Furthermore, the contents produced about Brussels indicate that online news producers may consistently portray poorer areas of the city as hosting more social problems than richer areas, hence stigmatizing these places. Finally, results suggest that the methodology presented and tested is viable to study place-problematizing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the LaPIJ (Laboratoire des Pratiques et Identités journalistiques) at the ReSIC-ULB for allowing this research to happen and for providing a safe place to discuss and exchanges ideas, as well as the COMET at the University of Tampere for the feedback provided during the doctoral seminar. More generally, we thank those who have contributed to this paper by providing feedback and comments at the seminars or during informal moments.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Abbreviation of “Presse Quotidienne Régionale” for “French regional daily press.”
2 The term “pure player” is used (in English) by French speakers to describe web-native news outlets.
3 As Chantal Mouffe conceptualizes it.
4 For an overview of the main commonalities and differences in modern local news ecosystems, see Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s (Citation2015) introductory chapter of the book, Local Journalism: The Decline of Newspapers and the Rise of Digital Media. See the other chapters for analyses and comparisons of local news ecosystems.
5 The term referred to is croissant pauvre in French.
6 On the night of Friday, November 13, 2016, Paris suffered a terrorist attack involving gunmen and suicide bombers. They hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars almost simultaneously—leaving 130 people dead and hundreds wounded. Some of the attackers had been residents of the municipality of Molenbeek, Brussels.
7 On the morning of March 22, 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings occurred in Belgium: two at Brussels Airport in Zaventem and one at Maelbeek metro station in central Brussels. Thirty-two civilians and three perpetrators were killed, and more than 300 were injured. These attacks were related to the Paris events and some individuals were linked to the first attack in Paris.
8 We based our seven categories on a more exhaustive list of topics applied to content analysis (see Lynch and Peer Citation2002). While testing our research instrument, we added “Urban Mobility” as a new category, since preliminary observations made it seem relevant to our case. We also merged cultural themes with the entertainment category (so that it became “Entertainment/Culture”).
9 Some public institutions in Brussels are required by law to have bilingual websites.
10 During this process, we made sure to take into account the language(s) used for each site. For example, we used “Bruxelles” for French-speaking sites, “Brussel” for Dutch-speaking and “Brussels” for English-speaking websites.
11 A relatively easy way to spot when the term “city” of Brussels is used to describe the central municipality is the use of the capital C, as in the expression “the City of Brussels has decided … ”. For the presentation of the analysis, we use the English terms to facilitate reading, but as our sample is multilingual, original terminology varied. Fourteen percent of the items in our sample did not mention the term but still ended up in our sample. This is due to the fact that some news pieces talked about one of the city’s municipalities without mentioning the city explicitly (but using the term in the metadata or tags), which made it even more difficult to understand which territory was referred to in the piece.
12 As explained in the methodology, these four websites were removed from the content analysis sample because they focused on EU issues.
13 Topics of sports and tourism did not frame issues either, but results must be interpreted carefully due to the low number of items regarding these topics.
14 Ixelles is a large municipality south of the city center, which is home to the French- and Dutch-speaking universities of Brussels and the multicultural “Matongé” neighborhood.
15 Lindgren stated this in a similar study done on Toronto Star newspaper’s news coverage of 13 troubled neighborhoods in Toronto, designated as “priority areas”.