Regional press diversity in Germany and Austria: the economic and journalistic development of newspapers 1995-2015

媒体体系面临的根本性变化不仅影响到国家优质媒体，也影响到德国和奥地利的地方和地区性报纸。从传播政策的角度来看，发行量下降、所有权集中、标题合并、合作、甚至编辑单位的融合可能被视为对没有相关媒体选择的地区媒体市场中的新闻多样性的危险。假设民主国家的国家新闻政策旨在将保护新闻多样性作为应用不同政策措施的高排名规范性目标，我们采用两国比较(奥地利和德国)不同新闻政策的长期后果(1995-2015)及其对(1)区域市场结构、(2)区域新闻多样性和(3)某一报纸内新闻报道的多样性的影响。在媒体政策研究方面，我们根据对新闻统计的二次评价以及初步调查和文件分析，分析了两国区域新闻市场的结构及其在过去二十年中的发展情况。在集中化研究的基础上，我们为每个国家确定了一个稳定的区域报纸市场(在所有权、标题数量或编辑单位方面没有重大的结构性变化)和两个活跃的区域，其中发生了新闻集中(德国)或多样化(奥地利)。此外，我们重新构建了1995-2015年间相关出版商的个人组织战略。随后，我们将进行纵向比较内容分析，以比较奥地利和德国两个动态地区的新闻多样性的现状和发展，并与各国稳定地区的多样性进行比较。此外，我们还可以比较某家报纸的内部新闻多样性与其(不断变化的)市场地位的关系。

The radical changes the media system is facing affect not only the national quality press but also the local and regional newspapers in Germany and Austria. From a communication policy perspective declining circulation, concentration of ownership, merging of titles, cooperation and even fusion of editorial units could be seen as dangers for the journalistic diversity in regional media markets where no relevant media alternatives exist. Assuming that national press policies in democratic nations aim at safeguarding journalistic diversity as a high ranked normative goal in applying different policy measures we employ a bi-national comparison (Austria and Germany) of the long term consequences (1995-2015) of different press policies and their consequences for the (1) regional market structures, the (2) regional journalistic diversity, and the (3) diversity of news coverage within a certain newspaper.Bringing together the lines of press concentration research, journalism quality and diversity research, and media policy research we analyse the structure of the regional press markets in both countries and their development over the past two decades based on secondary evaluations of press statistics as well as primary surveys and document analyses). On the basis of the concentration research we identify one stable regional newspaper market (without significant structural changes in terms of ownership, number of titles or editorial units) for each country and two dynamic regions where either concentration (Germany) or diversification (Austria) of the press has taken place. Additionally we reconstruct the individual organizational strategies of the relevant publishers from 1995-2015.Following, we will conduct a comparative longitudinal content analysis to study the status and the development of the journalistic diversity in the two dynamic regions in Austria and Germany in comparison with the diversity in stable regions of each country. In addition we can compare the internal journalistic diversity of a certain newspaper in relation to its (changing) market position.