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

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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.