Abstract
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the contributors they share. Using connections between outlets, we demonstrate how contributors’ publishing trajectories tend to align with outlet political leanings. We also show how polarized clustering of outlets translates to differences in the topics of news covered and the style and tone of articles published. In addition, we demonstrate how contributors who cross partisan divides tend to focus on less explicitly political topics. This work addresses an important gap in the media polarization literature, by highlighting how structural factors on the production side of news media create an ecosystem shaped by political leanings, independent of the priorities of any one person or organization.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2034-2056 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | New Media and Society |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2023 |
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1755873. The authors would like to thank Joshua Jacobs, Nicholas Diakopoulos, and the members of LINK at Northwestern University for their input and assistance on this manuscript. They also thank the participants of the Northwestern Communication Studies seminar and their anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1755873.
Keywords
- Computational methods
- digital journalism
- freelance journalism
- network analysis
- news production
- polarization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication
- Sociology and Political Science
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Writer movements between news outlets reflect political polarization in media
Hagar, N. (Creator), Wachs, J. (Creator) & Horvát, E.-Á. (Creator), SAGE Journals, 2021
DOI: 10.25384/sage.c.5494073, https://sage.figshare.com/collections/Writer_movements_between_news_outlets_reflect_political_polarization_in_media/5494073
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