Journalism and the political structure

Abstract

This article assumes a media system perspective on the local news media structure in Norway, using a dataset of 847,487 news articles collected from 156 Norwegian news outlets in 2015–2017. Using a series of hypotheses, the analysis uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling to ascertain to what extent local journalism meets community information needs through infrastructure, output and performance. The analysis finds that the size of the publisher and the size of the community covered matter more for hard news coverage than regulatory factors. To that end, the results indicate that the Norwegian local media system is somehow shaped by the geography of the political landscape. The results and their contributions are discussed in light of media systems theory and local journalism structures.

Micro media systems

“…Mathisen (2010) showed that in local media in Norway, journalists and sources are mutually dependent, as they need to interact over and over both in the roles of sources and journalists but also in other capacities in the local society. Sjøvaag et al, (2019) showed that the size and isolation of local media systems impact on journalism's local community and accountability function in Norway.…”

Medievalgkampen 2017: Mediedekningen av partier, politikere og saker.

“…Denne analysen er metodisk ulik tidligere undersøkelser og er et forsøk på å finne ut hvordan vi gjør studier av politisk journalistikk der vi har tilgang til tilnaermet ubegrensede mengder mediedata (se også Sjøvaag, Pedersen & Laegreid, 2019). Utfordringene ligger ikke lenger i å samle data, men å gjøre analysene teoribaserte og meningsfulle.…”