6533b821fe1ef96bd127ac0d

RESEARCH PRODUCT

News Selection Within Customer Magazines

subject

description

Customer magazines blur the boundaries between journalistic reporting and organizational information. On the one hand, customer magazines are intended to communicate the interests, brands, products, and services of an organization. On the other hand, their topics, style, and layout resemble those of journalistic publications, from which readers expect independent and objective reporting. While customer magazines are distributed in high numbers throughout different industries and play an increasingly important role in the media landscape, they have hardly been the focus of researchers to date. It is therefore quite unclear how editorial decisions are made within these publications. This study investigated the relevance of journalistic news factors for topic selection in customer magazines and the extent to which these factors differ from those of journalistic publications. We conducted a quantitative survey of customer magazines’ editors-in-chief in Germany (N = 143). We compared their responses on the rel...