Jonathan Hendrickx

University of Vienna | UniWien · Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften

News diversity is increasingly gaining momentum and relevance in academic research, but quantifying and qualifying the term remains problematic. This paper presents the results of a structured meta-synthesis literature review, in which all relevant publications dealing explicitly with news diversity, media diversity or content diversity of the 21st...

In this article, we assess the interactions between user metrics and journalists, as newsrooms shift towards "data-informed" models in which the main online news performance indicator becomes the "time spent" metric, instead of the number of clicks. The paper at hand applies a mixed methods approach combining components of ethnographic participant...

Social media have become indispensable tools for (legacy) news companies and brands to increase online traffic for their own platforms. A recent trend is the production and dissemination of native news content specifically for and through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This paper uses a mixed methods research design to study the...

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually,...

This article proposes a conceptual framework for the concept audience agency, which plays a vital role in the current audience turn in journalism (research). It presents two types of audience agency, deliberate and incidental, and three levels at which they can manifest: the micro level of the individual, the meso level of organised groups and the...

As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of...

Facebook remains the most important platform where social media editors package and try to ‘sell’ media outlets’ online news articles to audiences. In one of the first studies of its kind, we assess how this practice was effectuated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use computational analysis to determine the polarity, subjectivity...

News agencies are regularly mentioned in scholarly works among the principal sources of information for legacy news organisations and titles, particularly in the 24/7 online news environment. However, little is known about how these agencies themselves source news. To fill this gap in scholarship, we present a case study of how Belgium’s national,...

Social media editors (SMEs) have become fixtures in contemporary newsrooms as part of designated social media teams. A growing body of scholarship has explored their daily work routines and how they try to ‘sell’ online news on platforms such as Facebook while caught in the middle between mass media and social media logics. Thus far, there is littl...

Media companies increasingly place (parts of) their online news content behind to compensate for shrinking digital advertising revenues. However, despite its prominence in the contemporary news environment, very few studies have assessed the effects of this practice on the diversity in the actual content provided to people. To fill this knowledge g...

Scholarship is recognising that news diversity is jeopardised by heightened media ownership consolidation and a lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Using an automated quantitative content analysis of 658,493 articles published between 2018 and 2021 by two newspapers of the same recently emerged Belgian corporation that had to comply with sti...

For decades, news content analysis has been a staple in journalism research. It facilitates discussions and insights on sections of various types of media content, ranging from newspaper articles to tweets. However, it is usually carried out ad hoc for specific studies or projects, by researchers from various countries using a plethora of approache...

Hanne Vandenberghe KU Leuven Hanne.vandenberghe@kuleuven.be Pauljan Truyens Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pauljan.truyens@vub.be Samenvatting De Nederlandse en Vlaamse mediamarkten zijn door toegenomen concen-tratie en fusies de afgelopen jaren naar elkaar toegegroeid. Vergelijkbaar wetenschappelijk mediaonderzoek blijft echter schaars. In deze paper...

In this article, we explore the relationship between increased media market concentration and its effects on the diversity of news content. We assemble a dataset of 1,419,479 print and online 'hard news' articles published between 2018 and 2021 by the four largest newspapers in Flanders (Belgium). These include two popular and two quality titles ow...

Several scholars and institutions have made attempts at defining and conceptualising news diversity, underlying its increasing relevance within and beyond academia. However, very few have operationalised it for a given media market , let alone in more than one simultaneously. In this paper, we critically assess existing theories and studies and pre...

News recommenders are attracting widespread interest in scholarly work. The current research paradigm, however, holds a narrow (mostly user-centered) perspective on the recommendation task. This makes it difficult to understand that their design is in fact the result of a negotiation process among multiple actors involved, such as editors, business...

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 bee...

Dit hoofdstuk schetst de evolutie van de Vlaamse en internationale me- diamarkten van de afgelopen decennia. Door de opkomst van digitale technologie konden nieuwe spelers (Google, sociale media...) de mediamarkt betreden. Tegelijk kwam er in de Vlaamse nieuwsindustrie een golf van concentratie op gang om het voortbestaan van de Vlaamse nieuwsmerke...

Nieuwsbedrijven kunnen op twee complementaire manieren reageren op groeiende concurrentie. Een eerste manier is door innovatief aanbod uit te werken. Dat betekent voor de traditionele media dat ze in toenemende mate 'digitaal gaan'. Daarnaast kunnen mediahuizen digitale technologie gebruiken om productie-en distributiekosten te drukken. Het vermind...

Content recommender systems have become commonplace in all digital platforms, and they profoundly alter the media content presented to users. This also applies to news recommender systems (NRSs) used by media companies. However, as it is generally accepted that diverse news coverage is crucial to maintain democratic societies, the role of NRSs is f...

Content sharing at DPG Media’s Flemish newspaper brands Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region Flanders has seen a wave of mergers & acquisitions (M&As) in recent years, leading to, according to the government-owned media watchdog, a highly concentrated Flemish media market (). The latest newly founded company is DPG Media, in which the majority of all co...

The Media for Democracy Monitor 2021: How Leading News Media Survive Digital Transformation (Vol. 2)

In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingenc...

In this paper, we report on an 18-month ethnographic field study inside the newsroom of a popular newspaper in Belgium, chronicling the endeavours of editors and journalists as they shift from a classic division between print and online beats to an integrated digital first-based newsroom. Throughout the paper, we stress the messiness and contingenc...

Among the slew of innovations piercing legacy news media in order to maintain their importance, relevance and financial viability, one notable shift in online newsrooms is the resurgence of newsletters as a controlled means of disseminating curated news content and controlling incoming traffic on news websites. This is particularly the case in Belg...

This article critically assesses the effects of media mergers on news diversity at Mediahuis, one of the leading players in the media market of the Belgian region of Flanders. The founding of Mediahuis (in 2013) has led to an extremely concentrated Flemish newspaper market, as it owns and publishes four of the seven daily newspapers. We conducted e...

In this paper, I present the results of an in-depth content analysis of over 12,000 print and online articles of four Flemish newspapers belonging to the same media corporation, Mediahuis, carried out between February 2018 and May 2019. I assess the degree in which articles are being recycled across the four different titles and find that news dive...

In the past decade, public service broadcasters have been confronted with major shifts affecting their remit, portfolio and financing. Heavily fuelled by cutbacks and increasing competition, discussions on 'distinctiveness' have resurfaced again and stand central in many policy discussions on the legitimacy of public service broadcasting. This arti...