Alternative News Media: Towards Less or More Diversity in the News?

The dawn and rise of the Internet have made the organization of online news platforms and the dissemination of contents to large audiences increasingly more easy and effortless. Not only have traditional news media outlets found their way to the World Wide Web, so too have new alternative news media. Defined as media produced outside mainstream media institutions and networks (Atton & Couldry, 2003, p. 549), they differ from the traditional news media on a structural and organizational level. They are independent from public and private stakeholders mostly associated with the media, which is argued to grant them the opportunity to offer truly alternative news media content that could deviate from the generally accepted ideals of neutrality and objectivity in news coverage. Despite abundant scholarly attention to the operational differences between traditional and alternative news media (e.g. Forde, 2011), very few studies focus on the differences in content in a systematical and empirical way. This study aims to add to the existing literature by empirically and quantitatively exploring the characteristics of alternative news media and their possible influence on the Belgian journalistic landscape. The focus of this study will be on the internal and external content diversity of actors and viewpoints. On the one hand, the diversity of actors and viewpoints is argued to indicate the quality of news reporting, assuming that news media take up their role as ‘fourth estate’ by presenting different and diverse societal actors and discussing multiple viewpoints. On the other hand, indicators of diversity allow for the easy and relatively objective quantitative comparison between news items and media outlets. Building on research that indicates that the organizational structure of news media affects the content diversity of their news output (Humprecht & Esser, 2018), alternative news media are expected to present a less diverse range of actors and viewpoints within their news coverage. However, they most likely present more ideologically distinct and radical actors and viewpoints, adding to the external diversity of the news media environment. A new dataset of roughly 1500 manually coded news articles on migration and unemployment published in four Flemish alternative news media will be analyzed quantitatively to study the effect of several factors (e.g. type of medium, length of article, issue, etc.) on multiple content diversity indicators (e.g. Simpson, 1949) and to compare with data on traditional news media. A pilot study of alternative news media articles on migration showed limited differences in internal content diversity compared to traditional news outlets. However, the actors mentioned and the viewpoints expressed differed drastically, both between alternative and traditional news media and among the alternative news media themselves. These results highlight the relevance of further exploratory research into the field of alternative news media and their possible influence on the journalistic environment as a whole.