Editorial Convergence Equals Lower News Content Diversity? A Mixed-Methods-Study Assessing Organization and Reporting of German Newspapers

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on two central elements of news journalism: editorial convergence and the diversity of news content. The goal was to examine a potentially negative impact of a more centrally organized newsroom on structural and content diversity in news journalism. Therefore, we examined three German newspapers with different degrees of editorial convergence to assess their organizational development as well as their reporting’s development regarding content diversity. Our results do not support a direct impact of editorial convergence on diversity. Independent of changes to editorial organization, the diversity of news content has remained the same on a high level.

KEYWORDS:

• Editorial convergence
• news content diversity
• newsroom organization
• news journalism
• news quality
• crossmedia

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For this development, we assessed two points in time, which are explained in detail later: T₀ between 1999 and 2008 when there were separated editorial departments, and T₁ in 2019.

2 Politics, economics, social issues, legal issues, environment, science, arts/culture, health.

3 Sports, nature, eroticism, fashion, personality, catastrophes, hobby, media, crime, traffic.

4 Both the relative entropy and the correlations regarding the topics were calculated for the dichotomized data, as 18 categories proved to be too artificially fragmented to produce conclusive results.

5 Both the relative entropy and the correlations regarding the genres were calculated for the dichotomized data, as 13 categories proved to be too artificially fragmented to produce conclusive results.