London's “Quality” Newspapers: Newspaper Ownership and Reporting Patterns

Departing from the usual philosophical analyses of European media, this study applied empirical methods to examine the relationship between the type of newspaper ownership and news reporting patterns of London's four major “quality” newspapers. Examination of front-page articles from composite weeks in three years showed that independently owned dailies covered stories that required more reportorial effort than did dailies owned by conglomerates. The independent dailies also had more staff-bylined articles, used more enterprise news sources, and covered more stories that involved conflict.