We investigate how news values differ between online and print news articles. We hypothesize that print and online articles differ in terms of news values because of differences in the routines used to produce them. Based on a quantitative automated content analysis of N = 762,095 Dutch news items, we show that online news items are more likely to be follow-up items than print items, and that there are further differences regarding news values like references to persons, the power elite, negativity, and positivity. In order to conduct this large-scale analysis, we developed innovative methods to automatically code a wide range of news values. In particular, this article demonstrates how techniques such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, supervised machine learning, and automated queries of external databases can be combined and used to study journalistic content. Possible explanations for the difference found between online and offline news are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.