ABSTRACT

News media are important for society, because they provide information on relevant topics based on journalistic norms, such as truthfulness and impartiality. However, traditional news brands have found new competition in non-journalistic digital media. Google and YouTube have disrupted the business model of journalism by creating platforms on which everything and everyone competes for consumers’ attention. Despite the recognised importance of this topic, empirical studies about the competitive situation of (journalistic) news media brands in the limitless digital media market are scarce. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which non-journalistic competitors replace traditional news media brands in relation to relevant topics. A programmed web scraping software automatically gathered Google and YouTube search results of trending topics (e.g. Industry 4.0, Blockchain, or CRISPR). Afterwards, a manual content analysis was conducted to classify the source of each search result (e.g. news media brand, corporate publisher, non-governmental organisation) (N = 556 Google results and 792 YouTube results). The findings show that news media brands still dominate on Google but placed a distant third on YouTube, behind amateurs and corporate publishing. News media brands should reconsider their strategies for YouTube with regard to presenting their content.

摘要

新闻媒体对社会很重要，因为它们提供基于新闻规范（如真实性和公正性）的相关主题的信息。但是，传统新闻品牌在非新闻数字媒体中发现了新的竞争。Google和YouTube通过创建一个平台，让所有人和所有人都在争夺消费者的注意力，从而破坏了新闻业的商业模式。尽管该主题的重要性已得到公认，但关于（新闻）新闻媒体品牌在无限的数字媒体市场中的竞争状况的实证研究很少。这项研究的目的是调查与相关主题相关的非新闻竞争对手在多大程度上取代了传统新闻媒体品牌。编程的网页抓取软件会自动收集趋势主题（例如Industry 4.0，Blockchain或CRISPR）的Google和YouTube搜索结果。之后，我们进行了手动内容分析，以对每个搜索结果的来源进行分类（例如，新闻媒体品牌，企业出版商，非政府组织）（N =  556个Google搜索结果和792个YouTube搜索结果）。调查结果表明，新闻媒体品牌仍然在Google上占主导地位，但在YouTube上排在第三位，仅次于业余爱好者和企业出版。新闻媒体品牌应重新考虑其YouTube在展示其内容方面的策略。