Browsing by Author "Bollen, Johan"
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Item Power structure in Chilean news media(2018) Bahamonde, Jorge; Bollen, Johan; Elejalde, Erick; Ferres, Leo; Poblete, BárbaraEven democracies endowed with the most active free press struggle to maintain diversity of news coverage. Consolidation and market forces may cause only a few dominant players to control the news cycle. Editorial policies may be biased by corporate ownership relations, narrowing news coverage and focus. To an increasing degree this problem also applies to social media news distribution, since it is subject to the same socio-economic drivers. To study the effects of consolidation and ownership on news diversity, we model the diversity of Chilean coverage on the basis of ownership records and social media data. We create similarity networks of news outlets on the basis of their ownership and the topics they cover. We then examine the relationships between the topology of ownership networks and content similarity to characterize how ownership affects news coverage. A network analysis reveals that Chilean media is highly concentrated both in terms of ownership as well as in terms of topics covered. Our method can be used to determine which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage.Item Quantifying the ecological diversity and health of online news(2018) Elejalde, Erick; Ferres, Leo; Herder, Eelco; Bollen, JohanEven in developed countries with an active free press, news coverage can be dominated by only a few players. This can lead to a reduction of topical and community diversity. Ownership structures might further limit coverage by implicitly or explicitly biasing editorial policies. In this paper, we apply ecological diversity measures to quantify the health of the Chilean online news ecology using extensive ownership and social media data. Results indicate that high levels concentration characterizes the Chilean media landscape in terms of ownership and topical coverage. Our methods reveal which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage and can be generalized to any nation's news system.