Work

Unfolding the Multi-layered Structure of the French Mediascape

Year: 2019
Type: report
Abstract: How to interpret this corpus.This corpus therefore provides a representation of the information production space on the French Web.It is obviously imperfect, arbitrary and questionable.We have deliberately excluded websites and blogs that produce only opinions, analyses and comments (experts, think tanks, bloggers, personal websites).Moreover, we have not included in the corpus websites explicitly linked to political or trade union organizations, which constitute another subspace of the digital public space.The criterion that has guided us in the constitution of this corpus is the production of information.This is a relatively easy way to identify professional media composed of journalists producing articles.On the other hand, this criterion is much more uncertain for identifying websites in the counter-informational sphere that comment on, transform and misuse information produced by other media.Taking advantage of the expertise of Le Monde's journalists in the production of the Decodex for several years, it has nevertheless been possible to introduce into the corpus a set of websites of the counterinformational sphere that publish information and, for some of them, relay a large amount of information even when they are above all opinion websites.Moreover, unlike the large central media editorial staff, some of them are in fact one-person media.We kept them in the corpus only if the website revealed a certain influence on the circulation of digital information and if the author, beyond analyses and comments, had also produced original information.Albeit imperfect, incomplete and questionable, the methodology used to build this corpus nevertheless provides an accurate overview of the digital media space in France by highlighting its different polarities.Important and influential websites may be absent from the corpus, sensitivities may not be represented, and some selected media may be removed from it.However, conceived as a construction in miniature of the media space, this representation aims to reveal the overall architecture of the French media ecosystem and not to propose an exhaustive mapping of all websites producing information.
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3008963432
Cites: 6
Cited by: 7
Related to: 10