Geography of News: Empirical Studies of German News Media

Abstract

This dissertation provides insights into the systematic regional variations in news content and unveils their regional determinants as well as their influence on the behavior of economic agents. It features three chapters with empirical analyses of the German news media, each addressing one of three distinct relations in the complex regional news system. The first chapter evaluates the potential of media data to capture regional peculiarities. The following chapter digs deeper into the alignment of regional news media coverage and innovation activities in regions. The third chapter shows how regional news content explains differences in people’s behavior. The dissertation establishes two news-related datasets at the sub-national level in Germany. In sum, the dissertation contributes to a better understanding of sub-national heterogeneity in media reporting, by showing that regional differences in media content both explain and are explained by regional socio-economic characteristics. The findings substantiate the potential of analyzing subnational developments through the use of news media information. Thereby this dissertation marks a starting point and reference for scholars aiming to study this promising area of research.