The Variety of Online and Print Newspapers: Italy

The aim of this short paper is to compare the level of content diversity between online and print newspapers in Italy, and to study its variation over time. Media economics and communication studies provide theoretical predictions regarding the variety of newspaper content. First, when the majority of revenue is derived from advertising, the degree of content diversity will be lower. Additional hypotheses are drawn from the very nature of online information services and from the readers’ observed behaviour. Empirical observations of five major newspapers over two months showed that, as expected, the group of online editions presented less variety in content. On the other hand, online and print editions did not present significant differences in terms of content variation day by day. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to directly measure the diversity across online and print newspapers.