Jelle W. Boumans

Changes in political news coverage: personalization, conflict and negativity in British and Dutch newspapers

Political news coverage has – allegedly – undergone profound changes in the past decades. A professionalization of both politics and journalism, increasing market pressures and technological developments (Negrine & Lilleker, 2002) have led to a new quality in the link between political actors and institutions and the mass media, but are also claimed to have greatly affected the way politics is covered in the media. Such changes include overall decreasing amounts of political news coverage, an increasing focus on political strategy and the horse-race in politics, increasing negativity towards political actors and politics in general, conflict as a central theme of the news and an increasing focus on political leaders and personalities (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995).

Taking stock of the toolkit: an overview of relevant automated content analysis approaches and techniques for digital journalism scholars

When analyzing digital journalism content, journalism scholars are confronted with a number of substantial differences compared to traditional journalistic content. The sheer amount of data and the unique features of digital content call for the application of valuable new techniques. Various other scholarly fields are already applying computational methods to study digital journalism data. Often, their research interests are closely related to those of journalism scholars. Despite the advantages that computational methods have over traditional content analysis methods, they are not commonplace in digital journalism studies. To increase awareness of what computational methods have to offer, we take stock of the toolkit and show the ways in which computational methods can aid journalism studies. Distinguishing between dictionary-based approaches, supervised machine learning, and unsupervised machine learning, we present a systematic inventory of recent applications both inside as well as outside journalism studies. We conclude with suggestions for how the application of new techniques can be encouraged.

Media Personalisation in Context: A Cross-National Comparison between the UK and the Netherlands, 1992–2007

The phenomenon of (media) personalisation has generated a considerable amount of scholarly attention and is regarded as being a significant aspect of contemporary politics and political communication. To investigate long-term trends in personalisation, this study draws on a unique data set that is composed of Dutch and British newspaper articles from a sixteen-year period. The evidence suggests that personalisation is present in both countries, but its realisation differs in each country: where the UK is characterised by a concentration of attention towards the prominent offices and the Prime Minister, the Netherlands has seen an increased visibility of the ‘non-prominent’ Cabinet members. The second part of the study investigates the impact of various events on the visibility levels of the most prominent ministerial functions, with particular attention paid to the Prime Minister. Leaders appear not to be more in the foreground during national crises. Finally, the explanatory power of events for determining the visibility of Cabinet members does not seem to increase in importance over time.

Nuclear voices in the news: A comparison of source, news agency and newspaper content about nuclear energy over time:

While news media are frequently criticized for their alleged increasing reliance on ‘subsidized content’ provided by sources and news agencies, this claim is seldom empirically verified. Based on insights from computer science, this study proposes an approach to quantitatively compare source, news agency and newspaper content over time. Including press releases from two corporate actors and one nongovernmental actor as well as articles of news agencies and newspapers, the approach is applied to the debate about nuclear energy in the Netherlands (2003–2012). Results show no indication of an increased similarity of newspapers’ content with either source content or news agency content, thus providing no justification for the concerns about an increasing dependency of newspapers on subsidized content. Contradicting literature, we found that media content is most similar to the nongovernmental organization’s content, with the exception of one regional newspaper that strongly reflects the local corporation’s content.

Subsidizing the News?: Organizational press releases’ influence on news media’s agenda and content

The relation between organizational press releases and newspaper content has generated considerable attention. Yet longitudinal evidence that can substantiate claims of media’s increased reliance on this “subsidized content” is scarce, and equally scarce is literature about the reliance of the news agency—a key factor in the news production process—on this content. Applying an automated content-analytical approach, this study assesses the impact of 4455 press releases on Dutch newspaper and news agency content over a period of 10 years. A distinction is made between source type (non-governmental organization or corporation) and newspaper type (quality, popular and free). Two indications of source reliance are proposed: first, the extent to which news articles are initiated by a press release, and second the extent to which the literal press release content is reproduced. Findings indicate that 1 in every 10 newspaper article is initiated by a press release; for the agency this is slightly higher. A routine of “churnalism”—copy-pasting of press releases—has been found for neither the agency nor the newspapers. These findings, combined with the fact that the reliance remains stable over time, call for a more nuanced perspective on journalists’ dependency on organizational press releases.