For decades, research has been quite skeptical towards the role journalism plays in local political life. This article shows that news organizations can take advantage of the web to play a new role in local democratic arenas. Based on a statistical and lexicometric analysis of online forums set up by a French regional newspaper (La Voix du Nord), this study shows how the morphology of municipalities impacts the way online discussion unfolds. Providing such online discussion arenas to citizens, the news organization plays the part of a “veil” in small cities playing down the effects of strong acquaintanceship among individuals – and the part of a “catalyst” in medium sized cities – promoting the rise of a local opinion. This article has been co-authored with Sylvain Parasie and is published in Revue Française de Science Politique (pdf available with CAIRN (english version), you can also download the slides as presented at the W2S seminar ).
- J-P. Cointet
- Morphogenesis
- Local networks, local topics: structural and semantic proximity in blogspace
- Social and semantic coevolution in knowledge networks
- Team formation dynamics
- Taxonomy of Socialist Party resolutions
- Phylomemetic Patterns in Science Evolution—The Rise and Fall of Scientific Fields
- Synthetic Biology Emergence
- Semantic Landscapes
- A metric for textual content
- Multi-level Science mapping
- Mapping Science Dynamics: a phylogenetic approach
- Authors and Concepts mapping
- Online press serving local democracy – a morphological analysis of political forums in France
- Food Security Frames
- The emergence and development of gene expression profiling
- Diffusion processes
- Tools and Methods