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Department of Information Science and Media Studies

Media Diversity

The project ”Diversity in the Norwegian News Media Landscape: A Hybrid Model for Evaluating Media Policy” is financed by the Norwegian Research Council and led by media researcher Helle Sjøvaag at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen.

Mangfold i mediene

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From 2015-2019, the project will collect large amounts of data (so-called ‘big data’) from Norwegian news media to establish the extent to which the Norwegian media landscape can be said to be diverse according to stipulations in Norwegian media regulation. The project aims to develop methods and theories to analyse aspects of diversity and pluralism in the media, and to evaluate the efficacy of regulation in ensuring diversity in the Norwegian news landscape. All in all the project will collect data from approximately 150 different editorial outputs at the local, regional and national level across ownership structures and publication platforms. The project will ultimately result in a number of publications analysing developments within the newspaper and broadcasting industries, journalism practices across platforms, and diversity levels in news dissemination across print, broadcasting, online and handheld media.

Project leader Helle Sjøvaag is a media scholar with research background primarily in news sociology and journalism, media regulation and media economy. Sjøvaag’s dissertation from 2011 addresses the issues of journalistic ideology, focusing on the Norwegian 24-hour news channel TV 2 News Channel. Since 2011, Sjøvaag has been working on a postdoc project on the structural aspects of journalism, primarily focusing on regional newspapers and chain ownership.

Post Doctor Truls Pedersen has a PhD in Information Science from the University of Bergen.