  Even democracies endowed with the most active free press struggle to maintain
the diversity of news coverage. Consolidation and market forces may cause only
a few dominant players to control the news cycle. Editorial policies may be
biased by corporate ownership relations, narrowing news coverage and focus. To
an increasing degree, this problem also applies to social media news
distribution, since it is subject to the same socio-economic drivers. To study
the effects of consolidation and ownership on news diversity, we model the
diversity of Chilean coverage on the basis of ownership records and social
media data. We create similarity networks of news outlets on the basis of their
ownership and the topics they cover. We then examine the relationships between
the topology of ownership networks and content similarity to characterize how
ownership affects news coverage. A network analysis reveals that Chilean media
is highly concentrated both in terms of ownership as well as in terms of topics
covered. Our method can be used to determine which groups of outlets and
ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage.
