Mapping Online Journalism in Transition: Exploring an Analytical Model

By operationalising Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and positions of autonomy and heteronomy, and applying a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to data gathered from a large content analysis, the article explores the relations between online newspapers and their corresponding print or broadcast versions within a constructed Danish “field of news” by graphically presenting the data as maps of the changes in these relations. First, mapping transformations graphically shows that the online newspapers have gained autonomy from their “parent platforms”, but we see that in the same period they have increased their dependence on news agency stories. Furthermore, the mapping demonstrates how the online newspapers differ in terms of news productions strategies and in their relation to their parent platforms, meaning they take up different positions in the field according to their “strength” based on a number of indicators.