Title: Understanding News Outlets' Audience-Targeting Patterns,
Abstract: The power of the press to shape the informational landscape of a population
is unparalleled, even now in the era of democratic access to all information
outlets. However, it is known that news outlets (particularly more traditional
ones) tend to discriminate who they want to reach, and who to leave aside. In
this work, we attempt to shed some light on the audience targeting patterns of
newspapers, using the Chilean media ecosystem. First, we use the gravity model
to analyze geography as a factor in explaining audience reachability. This
shows that some newspapers are indeed driven by geographical factors (mostly
local news outlets) but some others are not (national-distribution outlets).
For those which are not, we use a regression model to study the influence of
socioeconomic and political characteristics in news outlets adoption. We
conclude that indeed larger, national-distribution news outlets target
populations based on these factors, rather than on geography or immediacy.