Quantifying the ecological diversity and health of online news

Even in developed countries with an active free press, news coverage can be dominated by only a few players. This can lead to a reduction of topical and community diversity. Ownership structures might further limit coverage by implicitly or explicitly biasing editorial policies. In this paper, we apply ecological diversity measures to quantify the health of the Chilean online news ecology using extensive ownership and social media data. Results indicate that high levels concentration characterizes the Chilean media landscape in terms of ownership and topical coverage. Our methods reveal which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage and can be generalized to any nation's news system.