Assessing News Content Diversity in Flanders: An Empirical Study at DPG Media

Abstract

In this paper, we outline a content analysis of 541,083 national and international news articles, all published between 2018 and 2020 in the print and online versions of the two newspapers of the biggest private media company in Flanders (Belgium). Through automated text analysis, we assess articles for their internal content overlap, which has been linked by scholarship to possible negative effects of increased media market consolidation. Results reveal that while the overall content overlap between the two newspapers has remained stable, one of the two titles has copy-pasted articles from the other one increasingly, while also recycling content more frequently across its own newspaper and website. These findings are positioned in Flanders' small and highly concentrated media market and subsequently contextualised in a broader perspective of news diversity within media markets and societies.