German online publishers focus on politics, society and sports - Bild with unique mix of topics

For the analysis, we examined the top ten positions on the home pages of Bild, T-Online, Focus, NTV, RND, Spiegel, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Tagesschau, Welt and Zeit Online. The results show that almost all of them focus mainly on topics from the politics sphere.

At NTV, RND, Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesschau, Welt and Zeit Online, articles on political events account for more than 50 percent of all articles evaluated. At T-Online, Stern and Focus, the share is about one-third. Bild has the lowest share of political articles. The tabloid and T-Online are the only media where another section plays a greater role on the home pages

These are topics from social topics. This topic also plays a major role for other publishers, accounting for a third each at T-Online, Focus and Stern or Zeit Online. NTV and Welt have the lowest proportion of articles in the subject of social issues, at 13 percent and 16.2 percent respectively.

Bild

The mix of topics is greatest on Bild's home page. Articles on the topics of politics, society, sports and celebrities make it to the top ten positions in roughly equal proportions. At over nine percent, reports from the area of public security also take up a larger share than with the other publishers examined. Business articles, on the other hand, hardly play a role at 1.5 percent. With Bild, it is striking: Four categories are ranked ahead of politics.

There is just as much coverage of celebrities as of societal issues. Sports topics appear most frequently on the home page. Here, the share is almost 24 percent. Tagesschau and Spiegel published the fewest articles on sports in the top ten positions.

Business reporting plays a comparatively minor role with all the publishers surveyed. The topic is followed most closely at FAZ. Here, the share is 8.7 percent. NTV comes in second place, that for example publishes the recurring column Der Börsen-Tag (“The stock exchange day”) at the top position. At Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, Zeit Online and Tagesschau, the share of business news within the top ten articles is in the range between four and five percent.

In addition to Bild (9 percent), articles and reports from the area of blue light are also represented by Focus with around five percent. Blue light seems to play a particularly important role in local media. At RND, the national offering of the locally rooted Madsack publishing house, the share is a comparatively high 2.5 percent and thus in the range of reach portals such as T-Online and NTV, although still far removed from Focus and Bild.

Different weights for the openers

Taking a look at the lead story, the top and most important position on a home page, is particularly interesting. There, too, articles from the field of politics dominate. The proportion there is often even higher compared to the top ten positions. Only at Bild, NTV and Stern were less than half of all lead stories on political topics. However, NTV plays a special role here, since liveblogs are often in the top position, which are counted as miscellaneous in our analysis. At Bild, the share of politics increases by just under ten percentage points compared to the top ten articles, while the sports category decreases by twelve percentage points.

In the lead story, the share of articles from the sports section also decreases significantly at Focus, FAZ and Welt. At RND, Spiegel, Tagesschau and Zeit Online, on the other hand, the content mix in the lead story is similar to the following nine positions. Only the share of politics articles was slightly higher and was balanced out by the other categories.

At T-Online, too, the agenda setting in the lead article deviates from the average of the top 10 positions. For example, the sports share is about five percentage points higher and the politics share is as much as 19 percentage points higher. Articles from the society category, on the other hand, appear much less frequently in the lead story. As a wide range portal, T-Online therefore definitely focuses on political content in the lead story and supplements these topics with other articles from the areas of sports and society. T-Online's focus on sports clearly sets it apart from other high-reach portals such as Focus and Bild, which focus more on society and celebrities in their lead stories.

Methodology

The home pages of Bild, T-Online, Focus, NTV, RND, Spiegel, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Tagesschau, Welt and Zeit Online were examined in mobile view using special web crawlers. The period of the study was from January 1, 2023 to April 30, 2023. In the analysis, the articles within the top ten positions were automatically assigned to the categories by artificial intelligence methods. For T-Online, the data had only been available since mid-January.

This article was first published on medieninsider.com on 09.05.2023 in german.