Journalism and the political structure: The local media system in Norway

Abstract

This article assumes a media system perspective on the local news media structure in Norway, using a dataset of 847,487 news articles collected from 156 Norwegian news outlets in 2015–2017. Using a series of hypotheses, the analysis uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling to ascertain to what extent local journalism meets community information needs through infrastructure, output and performance. The analysis finds that the size of the publisher and the size of the community covered matter more for hard news coverage than regulatory factors. To that end, the results indicate that the Norwegian local media system is somehow shaped by the geography of the political landscape. The results and their contributions are discussed in light of media systems theory and local journalism structures.