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

媒介体制的剧烈变革不仅影响到德国和奥地利的全国性报刊，也影响到地方和区域性报刊。从传播政策的角度来看，发行量的下降、所有权的集中、标题的合并、合作甚至编辑单位的合并都可能被视为对没有其他相关媒介的区域媒介市场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)区域市场结构的影响，(2)区域新闻多样性，以及(3)某份报纸内新闻报道的多样性。我们将媒体集中度研究、新闻质量和多样性研究以及媒体政策研究结合起来，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（基于对新闻统计数据的二次评估以及初步调查和文件分析）。在集中度研究的基础上，我们为每个国家确定了一个稳定的区域性报纸市场（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），以及两个动态区域，其中媒体集中（德国）或多元化（奥地利）已经发生。此外，我们重建了1995-2015年相关出版商的个人组织策略。接下来，我们将进行纵向比较内容分析，研究奥地利和德国这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新闻多样性进行比较。此外，我们可以比较某一报纸的内部新闻多样性与其（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.