Understanding News Outlets' Audience-Targeting Patterns

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Chilean news outlets target audiences, revealing that local outlets are geography-driven while national outlets focus on socioeconomic and political factors, using models to analyze audience reach patterns.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of audience-targeting patterns in Chilean media, highlighting the influence of geography and socioeconomic factors on news outlet reach.

Findings

Local outlets are driven by geographical factors.

National outlets target based on socioeconomic and political characteristics.

Audience targeting patterns vary between local and national newspapers.

Abstract

The power of the press to shape the informational landscape of a population is unparalleled, even now in the era of democratic access to all information outlets. However, it is known that news outlets (particularly more traditional ones) tend to discriminate who they want to reach, and who to leave aside. In this work, we attempt to shed some light on the audience targeting patterns of newspapers, using the Chilean media ecosystem. First, we use the gravity model to analyze geography as a factor in explaining audience reachability. This shows that some newspapers are indeed driven by geographical factors (mostly local news outlets) but some others are not (national-distribution outlets). For those which are not, we use a regression model to study the influence of socioeconomic and political characteristics in news outlets adoption. We conclude that indeed larger, national-distribution news outlets target populations based on these factors, rather than on geography or immediacy.