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Abstract
News consumption has shifted increasingly to new platforms and gateways such as social network sites (SNS) with Facebook leading the way. Accordingly, journalists must cope with this “uneasy bedfellow” and provide news on Facebook to attract otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. This is even more relevant for public service broadcasters (PSBs), whose mission is to serve the interests and needs of every citizen. Bound to their public service mission, PSBs have to generally fulfill specific normative requirements such as diversity within their coverage, particularly to a higher degree than their commercial counterparts. Consequently, these requirements should be transferred to public service online supply in general and to public service supply on platforms such as Facebook. Whereas these demands have at best been roughly discussed, they have not been investigated to date. Therefore, we conducted a content analysis of the most viewed public service and commercial German TV newscasts and their respective Facebook sites, and analyzed whether public service news outperform commercial news on Facebook and whether they perform as good as on TV in terms of diversity (diversity of issues and of people and groups). Results show that public service news on Facebook show an even higher performance (albeit slightly) than on television.
Notes
1. van Cuilenburg (Citation2007) also mentions two other criteria. The first is diversity of content, which refers to the diversity of detailed information units or opinions of specific events or issues. This indicator can only be measured when running case studies and is therefore not applicable to our study. Besides, the author mentions diversity of geographical coverage and relevance (i.e., local, regional, national, and international media content), whereby we consider both aspects to be less important regarding the informing and integrating mission of public service broadcasting when compared to the analyzed dimensions (diversity of issues, diversity of people and groups).
2. van Cuilenburg (Citation2007) also included diversity of formats in this dimension. This aspect refers to different program genres and is not applicable to an analysis of newscasts.
3. This dimension has to be distinguished from the diversity of news events (e.g., Beckers et al. Citation2017) or the diversity of individual aspects within coverage of an issue (e.g., Choi Citation2009).
4. This is comparable to the concept of actor diversity (e.g., Masini et al. Citation2017).
5. Altogether, the codebook included 14 possible news genres: 1. politics, 2. economy, 3. society/justice, 4. science, 5. culture/cultural events, 6. religion/church, 7. nature/environment, 8. accidents/catastrophes, 9. crime, 10. human interest/everyday life, 11. sports, 12. weather (forecast), 13. consumer advice issues, 14. Internet/new communication technologies.
6. Altogether, the codebook included six societal spheres: (1) political system (politicians), (2) citizenry (ordinary citizens), (3) sociocultural system (e.g., VIPs, artists, sportsmen, media/journalism, science/experts); (4) administrative system (public institutions e.g., schools, hospitals, the police), (5) interest groups/NGOs, (6) economic system.