World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

This theoretical paper synthesises media and economics theory in an effort to advance operational definitions of media diversity. Through a review of literature, the paper identifies media scholarship definitions of diversity as primarily related to difference, rooted in normative democratic ideas of representation. The paper further suggests that media diversity can more fruitfully be understood as distance, appropriated through Hotelling’s spatial model and the umbrella model of newspaper markets. According to distance measures applicable to umbrella markets, diversity can thus be measured horizontally in terms of degree of substitution and vertically as degree of competition. Conceptualising diversity as distance, rather than as difference, the suggested model adds to the definitional literature on media diversity, fills operational and theoretical gaps in the research and suggests new ways in which economic theory is relevant to the study of media markets.