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

媒体系统面临的根本性变化不仅影响到国家质量新闻，而且影响到德国和奥地利的地方和地区报纸。从传播政策的角度来看，发行量下降、所有权集中、标题合并、编辑单位的合作甚至合并，都可能被视为在没有相关媒体替代品的区域媒体市场上对新闻多样性的威胁。假设民主国家的国家新闻政策旨在保障新闻多样性，作为应用不同政策措施的高级别规范目标，我们采用了两国比较（奥地利和德国）的长期后果（1995-2015）不同的新闻政策及其对（1）区域市场结构，（2）区域新闻多样性，（3）报纸新闻报道的多样性。本文结合新闻集中度研究、新闻质量与多样性研究和媒体政策研究，通过对新闻统计数据的二次评估以及初步调查和文献分析，分析了两国区域新闻市场的结构及其在过去20年中的发展。在集中度研究的基础上，我们确定了一个稳定的区域报纸市场（在所有权，标题或编辑单位的数量方面没有显着的结构性变化）为每个国家和两个动态区域，无论是集中（德国）或多样化（奥地利）的新闻发生。此外，我们还将重构1995- 2015年相关出版商的组织策略。接下来，我们将进行纵向内容比较分析，以奥地利和德国这两个动态地区的新闻多样性与两国稳定地区的新闻多样性相比较，研究其现状和发展。此外，我们还可以比较某份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.