Power relations among popular news websites for posting headlines through monitoring and imitation

초록

Online news production is guided by journalists' institutional orientation such as monitoring and imitation, which can result from power relations among popular news websites. Bourdieu suggested that news media are positioned within a set of economic and symbolic power relations. Given this framework, this study investigates how 13 popular Korean news websites respond to headlines of top online stories on their competitor websites by tracking the headlines on an hourly basis during one consecutive week. The results indicate that the top-ranked news websites often initiate the posting of headlines, whereas others simply follow the headlines by posting similar headlines. But symbolic power relations are not straightforward, because the leading news websites imitate the headlines posted by intermediary or following news websites. Power relations for the production of online news are a complex and fast phenomenon.

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