So Far, Yet So Close

The rise of digital journalism allows users to access regional news content from anywhere in the world. In this situation the content is local, but the audience may not be. Drawing on the sociological concept of translocality, the communicative linkage of dispersed geographic locations, this study investigated these emerging long-distance audiences. We combined automated and manual content analyses to (a) investigate the Twitter followership of 146 regional German newspapers and (b) explain the proportion of translocal followers they attract. Roughly one third of followers came from a different German federal state than the newspaper they followed. Papers with a high percentage of translocal followers tended to have older Twitter accounts and came from larger cities than those with fewer translocal followers. Furthermore, they covered regional sports and human-interest stories more, while those with fewer translocal followers placed greater emphasis on infrastructure, event notes, and current traffic information.