Page 186 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

9
and Murphy 1998, 7). By contrast the German daily newspaper mar-
ketseems still rather diversified. In 2001, 58 percent of the readers of
local dailies still had competitive papers to choose from (Schuetz 2001,
620). Concentration processes, however, are on the rise in Germany,
too. Looking at the eighty-three German cities with a population of
more than 100,000, thirty of them now only have one daily newspaper.
Seventeen cities have two dailies that belong to the same publishing com-
pany (Schuetz 2001, 622). In the United States, 98 percent of cities and
communities have only one newspaper. A huge concentration and con-
glomerization wave spilled over the country during the 1990s. Between
1994 and 2000, 47 percent of all local papers changed ownership, mostly
joining conglomerates of several dailies. At present, of the 1,500 dailies
in the United States, only about 300 remain independent (Yudken and
Owens 2002). Analyzing these trends, Thomas Kunkel and Gene Roberts
note:

“Unlike other realms of business, in the newspaper industry,
consolidation – in tandem with the chains’ desperation to main-
tainunrealisticprofitlevels(mostofthesecompaniesarenowbeing
publicly traded) – is actually reducing the amount of real news be-
ing gathered and disseminated, most conspicuously at the local and
state levels, where consumers need it the most. This is because con-
solidation has resulted in far fewer news outlets, and the economic
pressures have resulted in fewer reporters with fewer inches in the
paper to say anything” (Kunkel and Roberts 2001).

Globalization processes in the media sector accelerate this increase in lo-
cal concentration. Best cases in point are Eastern European media, which
since the early 1990s have been subject to intensive acquisition efforts by
West European and American media conglomerates. In Poland today,
50 percent of the forty-four regional dailies are owned completely or in
partbyforeignmediacompanies(Hadamik2001,154).Thewholecoun-
try has only fifteen local daily papers (Hadamik 2001, 155). In Bulgaria,
the German publishing group Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung estab-
lished a majority owner position in 1996, then later a complete owner-
ship of the so-called 168 press group, consisting of prominent weekly and

9 The Manchester Evening Chronicle was dismantled despite daily sales of a quarter
million papers (Franklin and Murphy 1998, 7), thus pointing to the fact that the
reason for shutting down a paper in many cases is not low readership, but lack of
advertisement revenue for competing publications on a single print media market.

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