Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap - Volume 49, Issue 1, 2021

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 (Vlaamse Regulator voor de Media, 2020). The latest newly founded company is DPG Media, in which the majority of all commercially owned major Flemish news outlets has seen its newsrooms merged into the same Antwerp-based building in early 2020. In this paper, we assess content homogeneity between the print and online versions of the two main newspapers of DPG Media by coding and analysing a sample of articles from 2018, 2019 and 2020. Results reveal only limited increases in shared content for the time being. Through distinguishing betweeninternaland external media concentration, the study serves as a steppingstone towards further content analysis research, in Flanders and beyond.

One outlook, many perspectives? Diversity in Flemish news media and the perception of the audience

A diverse range of actors and viewpoints can safeguard the quality of news reporting and the distribution of attention to different sides to a story. In this study, we look at the differences in content diversity between the news coverage on two (one socio-economic and one socio-cultural) cases in the Flemish news environment and how these differences translate into perceptions of diversity and bias with the audience. Despite limited differences in content diversity, we find that news items on the sociocultural and socio-economic case highlight different actors. Moreover, news items on the socio-cultural case are more neutral, while the coverage on the socio-economic issue contains more (balanced) viewpoints. These differences in content are largely translated into differences in perception. However, we find that a slight bias in perception of tone in the coverage on the socio-cultural issue is due to personal characteristics and issue-relevant attitudes.

Do I see or not? A study on the impact of placement on program consumption in an on-demand environment

The European Union (2018) stipulates that Member States can implement rules to ensure the findability and visibility of local content in video- on- demand environments. Indeed, several countries are concerned that their own audiovisual programs or journalistic products will be consumed less in such environments. It is argued that, in such environments, media users completely decide themselves about their consumption agency, but such statements are also contested. In this research we analyze the impact of placement on the consumption of audiovisual programs in the video-on-demand environments of the Flemish broadcasters VRT and DPG. From experimental research we conclude that there is indeed a significant impact of placement on consumption behavior and that, in other words, manipulations by intermediary gatekeepers can have potentially negative and positive effects on the consumption of local content. Government regulation would therefore be a useful tool to safeguard the importance of proximity of content.