Does ownership matter? Comparing the contents of corporate and independently owned local newspapers

Abstract

The consolidation of media ownership has been argued to be either the downfall or the salvation of the newspaper industry, depending on the perspective. Yet the impact of consolidation on newspaper content remains ambiguous. In this paper, we compare the output of 69 local newspapers (one issue per newspaper; 2133 items) published in Finland, some of them owned by major newspaper corporations, others by smaller companies. We code for item length, localness, authorship and, most importantly, we use a detailed content analysis to evaluate whether each article meets the readers’ Critical Information Needs, originally identified by Lewis Friedland and colleagues. The results reveal remarkable consistency between corporate and independent local newspapers across almost all variables: No statistically significant differences emerged in our comparison of the fulfillment of citizens’ different Critical Information Needs (CIN), nor in the items’ length, localness, or authorship. The only observed, statistically significant difference was in the shares of CIN-relevant items: corporate newspapers publish slightly more such content than independent papers. We conclude by discussing potential explanations to this isomorphism in local journalism.