Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?: Space, Place and Brussels’S Online News

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Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?: Space, place and Brussels’s online news

Article in Journalism Studies · January 2018 DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052

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Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?

Victor Wiard & Fábio Henrique Pereira

To cite this article: Victor Wiard & Fábio Henrique Pereira (2018): Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052

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Download by: [Victor Wiard] Date: 09 January 2018, At: 03:47 BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? Space, place and Brussels’ online news

Victor Wiard and Fábio Henrique Pereira

Within the context of the ongoing discussion on how the media represents spaces and territories to audiences, this pilot study proposes a methodological approach to investigate how diverse online news sources (national and regional legacy media, local public institutions, hyperlocal and community media, etc.) cover a territory—in this case, Brussels. Through a transversal analysis of the contents produced in 152 news items from as many sources, the paper aims to examine how online media ascribes particular meanings to spaces, which in the end might affect audiences’ perceptions. To assess how Brussels and its municipalities are represented, positive and negative values are assigned to news items describing its social problems. Results show that the complexity of Brussels’s institutional structure is an issue for the Belgian media, which has difﬁculty describing the territory it covers. Furthermore, the contents produced about Brussels indicate that online news producers may consistently portray poorer areas of the city as hosting more social problems than richer areas, hence stigmatizing these places. Finally, results suggest that the methodology presented and tested is viable to study place-problematizing.

KEYWORDS Brussels; content analysis; online media; place-naming; place-problematizing; social problems; territory

Introduction: Local News, Space and Place in a Digital World Over the last few decades, questions have arisen in academia regarding the pros and cons of digitization and convergence. If journalism scholars often highlight the positive potential of digitization to create a more networked and globalized society, others warn that this phenomenon could hypothetically threaten local(ized) news institutions, making their future uncertain (Nielsen 2015,1–26). However, it seems that local news is Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 still of interest to many, as demonstrated by the number of local news producers online. In many countries, consumption is at an all-time high. In France, for example, there is (still) a strong regional press—the PQR1—which competes online with local “pure players”2 (Bousquet and Smyrnaios 2012). In the United States, a dense network of local television channels (Nielsen 2015) shares audiences with local newspapers, as well as a variety of websites and online blogs (Anderson 2013). In the Netherlands, growing numbers of hyperlocal news ventures indicate a rebirth of local news (van Ker- khoven and Bakker 2014). In the United Kingdom, the BBC, which broadcasts national and international news, as well as regional and local news, is again competing with local newspapers and more than 300 hyperlocal news websites (Williams, Harte, and Turner 2014). This serves to show that national, local and regional news producers and outlets— which are still very much geographically embedded and geographically embedding their productions in this “glocalized” media space (Reese 2016)—are being joined by new actors on the internet. On the one hand, this could be problematic in the sense Journalism Studies, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

that professional (and institutionalized) local news have to compete with new actors in small markets. On the other, professional news outlets were never the only source of local information, even prior to digitization. The call to examine the variety of producers of local(ized) online news is being answered by researchers who have taken an ecosyste- mic approach to news production, which allows them to study the variety of actors (journalists, politicians, activists) participating in the construction of stories on specific territories (see Anderson 2013; Firmstone and Coleman 2015; Le Cam and Domingo 2015; Domingo and Wiard 2016). This body of research demonstrates how a diversity of individuals and institutions interacts to create news content. In the present paper, we propose to analyze the contents this diversity produced collectively. In this regard, one of the ways local news is especially important to democracy is in its depiction of specific spatial and political territories. We live in socially and politically constructed worlds (territories); our perceptions of which are very much influenced by news (Bousquet and Smyrnaios 2012; Noyer, Paillart, and Raoul 2013). Until recently, the institutional characteristics of journalism had encouraged researchers to study how professional journalists and legacy media institutions covered specific topics and territories (Bernstein et al. 1990; Bendix and Liebler 1999; Avraham 2000; Gasher and Klein 2008; Gasher and Klein 2008, 2009;Howe2009; Gutsche 2014a, 2014b). But besides the media—as creators and disseminators of news—a number of other social actors also assign meanings and values to territories. One of the main ways this happens is when certain territories are portrayed as problematic—as being vessels for a set of social problems (Blumer 1971; Schneider 1985; Ettema and Peer 1996; Best 2007). This paper’s approach goes beyond the study of how a social group is represented by the media and it tries to set up a methodology to understand (1) how the media constructs images of cities or neighborhoods by associating these places to a set of social problems and (2) how such images could potentially influence perceptions and various spatial decisions made by communities (Avraham 2000). To understand these processes, we turn to news geography with the conviction that news mapping can afford us a better understanding of news (Gasher and Klein 2008; Lindg- ren and Wong 2012). As rich as news mapping can be, however, it has so far only been done in a transversal way with a focus on how few news producers cover any given territory in depth. Following both arguments aforementioned—(1) news is the result of a diversity of online producers and (2) news content turns spaces into places—we crafted a methodo- Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 logical pilot study inspired on the concepts of news place-naming and place-problematizing to discuss place-representation by news producers. It is based on the analysis of news items from 152 producers identified through online monitoring. This approach seemed particularly pertinent to study an object whose collective definition as a territory is itself con- troversial: Brussels. Brussels is fertile ground for our research since it is an aggregate of places (with hundreds of neighborhoods) and territories—an ensemble of 19 municipalities with their local governments, at once a city and region, as well as the self-proclaimed capital of Europe. Following this reasoning, this paper sets out to explore how online media describes the “region” of Brussels and its 19 municipalities. In so doing, the study takes place within the context of the ongoing academic discussion regarding the place of local news in an increasingly digital, networked and globalized context. Finally, as a pilot study testing a methodology to approach the diversity of news producers online, we assess whether it is a viable approach. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 3

Literature Review Space, Place and Representation in Local News To understand how online news producers assign specific meanings to Brussels and its municipalities, it seems fitting to approach these political territories with geographical notions. For a long time now, human and social geographers have problematized the many social and political components of spatial entities (Lefebvre 1974; Tuan 1979; Cress- well 1996; Di Méo 1999, 2008; Jones et al. 2015). They usually distinguish two main types of interrelated and co-dependent entities: space and place (Tuan 1979). Space is generally understood as something that can be located—that relates to physics and geometry because it is comprised of “areas and volumes” (Cresswell 2014, 15). Place, on the other hand, is something that is a derivative of space—it cannot be understood without it. It is what happens when individuals attach meanings to relatively defined portions of space (Cresswell 2014,16–17). Place is the experience of the space, from which are derived the values and meanings we attach to it (Tuan 1979). A place has therefore multiple and con- tested meanings and, consequently, its hegemony is always negotiable, which makes places an issue of power—a political question3 (Massey 1994). The question of space and place, and how we experience local territories, also appeals to sociologists (Champagne 1993;Gieryn2000;Urry2001) and researchers in media studies (Couldry and McCarthy 2004; Lindgren 2009, 2011; Gutsche 2014a). There is a substantial body of literature that demonstrates how news produces meanings by employing techniques like priming, agenda-setting and framing (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007). These concepts are useful to demonstrate how the media influences collective meaning-making by making specific aspects of an issue more salient. In this regard, framing (Goffman 1974), and in our case media framing (Entman 1993, 2004), is especially relevant to understand not only the topics that are selected for news coverage, but also the ways in which issues are presented to audiences (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007, 15). This concept also holds true for the news processes that turn spaces into places, as place is also the result of a social construction; it is a collective process that happens through “identifying, designating, designing, building, using, interpreting, [and] remembering” (Gieryn 2000, 468). On a number of occasions, researchers have labeled this phenomenon “place-making” (Cresswell 1996; Gieryn 2000;Gutsche2014a, 2014b). In this regard, Gutsche (2014a) demonstrates how the media (and online news producers) participates in place-making in a variety of ways, includ- Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 ing discursively identifying and designating spaces in the contents it produces. Gutsche also emphasizes the role of journalists as central to place-making: … [P]lace-making [is] a communicative process, one that relies on voices of power (in this case, news media) to establish and maintain definitions of local community and to award power to particular voices […] Therefore I position journalists at the center of place- making and as working among other social power structures to construct dominant community identities that influence decisions about how resources are distributed to its people. (Gutsche 2014a, 58) At the end of this process, audiences interpret and remember spaces through the items consumed and shared (Gutsche 2011). In order to describe how news creates a feeling of place with regard to a suburb of Iowa City (USA), Gutsche (2014b) uses Zelizer’s(1993) conceptualization of journalists as an interpretative community to analyze the roles and practices of local journalists and how 4 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

they awarded power to sources who explained social conditions in the southeast-side neighborhood of the city as being derived from the “inner city” rather than presenting alternative, more complex explanations of individuals’ social conditions and trajectories (Gutsche 2014a, 58). By choosing specific sources, news media provides ideological lines along which spaces in a city should or should not be perceived. This happens partly through a process called “news place-naming,” understood as an operation during which words with specific negative or positive connotations are used to describe a specific territory (Gutsche 2014a). Martin (2000) had previously demonstrated how, in the United States, the negative portrayals of certain spaces are in conflict with local newspapers’ and activists’ representations of them. This directly relates to the fact that in most modern cities, a variety of actors compete to publish content on (online)(social)(local) media. Indeed, news is not uniquely the product of professional journalists anymore (one could argue that it has never been the case). In a study focusing on multiculturalism in the city/region of Brussels and the variety of actors participating in news production, Le Cam and Domingo showed how local news was produced through a diversity of actors: legacy and alternative media, institutions, bloggers, citizens and activists, who produced news in various ways (Le Cam and Domingo 2015). The scholars have demonstrated that all these actors use journalistic practices such as writing in a certain genre and use sources to produce their own news (Domingo and Le Cam 2014). For these reasons, we decided to analyze how Brussels is represented through place- naming. But because of the wide variety of online news producers identified in Brussels, we decided to move beyond the idea that journalists should be the focus of analysis and analyze instead the entire spectrum of news producers online.

Problematic Urban Places: The Case of Brussels The territories and types of content covered in the news, along with the diversity and penetration of existing media producers varies across countries and regions.4 However, most big cities (i.e. regional or national capitals) share many characteristics—such as the presence of competing actors, which is the result of local and regional actors offering content online and ofﬂine—to the point that this type of news ecosystems could be dubbed metropolitan news or “metropolitan journalism” (Anderson 2013). Our analysis of place-representation is circumscribed to one such city: Brussels and its municipalities. Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 Around 1,200,000 people live in Brussels. In geographical terms, it is an enclave in the region of Flanders, and a part of the Kingdom of Belgium. In order to understand more pre- cisely the situation of metropolitan Brussels, it is advisable to regard the city as a complex and multi-level territory (Favell and Martiniello 1999; Delwit and Deschouwer 2009). Brus- sels is at once the capital of Europe, a region, a metropolitan area, an agglomeration of 19 municipalities with their local governments and relative independence and one of the municipalities at its own center (the so-called City of Brussels). This situation is due to multiple sociohistorical factors: Belgium (of which Brussels became the capital in 1831) has an asymmetrical political system (with federal, regional and linguistic community institutions sharing power) and Brussels only became a region in 1990 following the country’s long federalization process. The city rose to become a center of European institutions because of Belgium’s role in Europe construction as well as its strategic position. Finally, Brussels is made up of hundreds of unofﬁcial neighborhoods, each with its own history and unique economic, social, cultural and linguistic characteristics (see Figure 1). BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 5

FIGURE 1. The region of Brussels and its municipalities. Source: Urbis, PRAS. Cartography: ULB – IGEAT. Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 For a long time, authors have highlighted Brussels’s geo-social speciﬁcities, including the fact that, paradoxically, the poorer fringes of the population live in the city center and the municipalities directly surrounding it, whereas richer inhabitants live in more distant municipalities to the northwest and southeast of the territory. This situation has produced the so-called poor croissant,5 which offers a visual representation of the densely populated area where most of the poorer inhabitants (some of whom are of immigrant descent) of the city live: the City of Brussels, Schaerbeek, Molenbeek, Anderlecht and to a certain extent Saint-Gilles and Ixelles (Deboosere and Fiszman 2009; Van Hamme, Grippa, and Van Criekin- gen 2016), some of which have been mentioned numerous times in relation to the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. This area and the municipalities it covers is dubbed that way because it is roughly the shape of a crescent (see Figure 2), following the Brussels canal from the south-west to the north-east of the region. In terms of news production, legacy media producing journalistic content about Brus- sels makes up a relatively small market, fragmented by cultural (and mainly linguistic) 6 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

FIGURE 2. Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 The “poor croissant” of Brussels. Source: of the background: Atlas de la santé et du social à Bruxelles-Capitale (2006), depicting unemployment and its correspondence with the “poor croissant.”

speciﬁcities. It is generally accepted that Belgian French-speaking audiences represent around 30 percent of its total while Dutch account for 60 percent (Reuters 2016). The Belgian media are often further distinguished by ownership (as content is produced through public and private institutions) and by type of content historically produced (newspaper, audiovisual or online). However, this division is unfruitful to analyze content produced online, as most outlets (though still attached to their original platform) disseminate both text and audiovisual content. Close to 5000 journalists with a Belgian professional press card revolve in this small and fragmented market (Raeymaeckers et al. 2013), to which must be added European journalists, unregistered journalists and writers, local activists, politicians and citizens as well as other alternative online news producing entities. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 7

It is estimated that more than 16,000 individuals work in the media sector in Brussels (Wiard and Domingo 2017), making the city a place where journalists are very concentrated. However, Belgium’s media market is dominated by a handful of large media groups (de Bens 2007). At the local level, Brussels is home to only one regional daily newspaper (in French), and two public regional media outlets (one for French-speaking and one for Dutch-speaking audiences). Local news in Brussels is the product of highly active networks of citizens and politicians working in conjunction with institutional and alternative news producers (Domingo and Le Cam 2014). Following the terror attacks in Paris6 and Brussels,7 the city felt like a different place. Because several terrorists of both attacks had transited through Brussels (particularly the municipalities of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek), it was described by some media outlets as a nest for terrorists and jihadists, with inefﬁcient immigration policies and poor city management. It was also branded a problematic area by national and international media. More than just an analysis of how the media name spaces place-representation pushes us to examine how online news producers create a certain sense of place; a sentiment toward the space. Traditional content analyses of media productions in the past have assessed the values attributed to objects of content, including places, by doing sentiment analysis. However, we tried to go beyond the positive, negative or neutral categorization of more traditional content analyses. To do so, and in addition of the concept of place-naming, we also investigated to what extent “each story was framed in terms of a social problem (i.e. whether the story analyzed a problem or reported a situation or event readily attributable to a problem)” (Ettema and Peer 1996, 838). Therefore, we focused on identifying social problems related to places within news items, a process that we call “place-problematizing,” for lack of a better word.

Media and Social Problems The constructivist approach in social sciences sees a social problem not as an “objective condition with a definitive objective makeup” (Blumer 1971, 300), but as the result of a process in which a condition is identified as a problem. Therefore, understanding social problems necessitates tracing the activities of the groups involved to recognize and legitimize a set of claims and grievances as a problem. Social problems are produced “when officials and professionals warrant definitions, implement them, and accept responsibility for pro- Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 blematic conditions” (Schneider 1985, 224–225). This includes the media actors: “after an issue has crossed the threshold and achieved recognition as a problem about which something should be done, journalists will have the ability to discuss this issue as a social problem in their repertoires” (Best 2007,4–5). As researchers, the question for us then becomes how to identify a (set of) social problem(s) in media coverage of a space. In a study on how social pathology vocabulary is used by media to describe lower-income urban neighborhoods in Chicago, Ettema and Peer (1996) investigated the extent to which stories were framed in terms of a social problem. These preliminary evaluations were then classified by themes and finally juxta- posed with the local community’s ability to solve these social problems. These findings allowed the researchers to talk about “good and bad news,” since they considered not only the situation, but also its development in the story. In another study about media representations of homelessness, Best (2007) developed a set of “social problems markers” that allowed her to identify stories framed as a social problem. In adapting her methodology, we 8 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

highlighted four useful markers: (1) any suggestion that something ought to be done about a situation or that not enough is being done about it; (2) any mention that public safety and well-being are at risk, or that death or injury could result from the situation; (3) any statement explicitly asking what can be done about the situation; and (4) the use of statistics related to the size or growth of the situation. In short, we operationalized place-problematizing (the ability of media to construct a social problem associated to a place) by applying two main discursive strategies: ﬁrst, in describing a given situation as something that must be solved (by the government or the community); and second, in relating it to a set of social problem markers as mentioned above.

Research Design Research Question This research explores how Brussels’s geography is depicted online and how heterogeneous actors represent it. We are especially interested in studying how news conveys specific meanings of what Brussels is, therefore making it a certain place, and in discovering how online news producers portray the territory of Brussels through place-naming and place-problematizing. Through this study, we look for designing and testing a methodological procedure that could help us understand this phenomenon, by asking: To what extent are place-naming and place-problematizing useful to understand how news producers create a sense of place? After identifying the wide array of websites that produce content about Brussels and assessing their productions, we noticed potential differences in how the region and the municipalities were covered. To scientifically assess our intuitions and set up a methodology for the analysis of news place-representation, we had to assess each stage of the process. To ensure study reproducibility, the following sections detail how (1) we build the categories for the analysis, (2) how we detected news producers about Brussels and the news products to be analyzed, and finally (3) how we analyzed them.

Building the Categories This research is aimed at constructing an instrument that could understand how the geography of Brussels is represented in media production. We set out to do this by pin- Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 pointing the terms used by news producers to identify Brussels and how frequently they appear in online news coverage. Indeed, the very controversy about what Brussels is (i.e. a municipality? a town? a capital? a region?) could serve as a backdrop against which to study the set of choices media and journalists make in order to represent this place, as well as the potential effects these discourses could have on audiences. Applying these categories to our analytical grid was quite simple—it consisted of a set of Yes/No questions concerning the mention of the word “Brussels,”“city,” capital” and “region” and the different ways it could be named. Since Brussels is legally considered an assemblage of 19 municipalities, we also coded each of them if they were mentioned in a story. We decided to focus on the city/region and municipal levels, and eschew the neighborhood level for two main reasons: (1) municipalities and regions are legally deﬁned territories, and as such have political impact, and (2) Brussels is comprised of hundreds of neighborhoods, and the sheer number of place names would make the interpretation of results unmanageable. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 9

The second dimension of our research is concerned with how Brussels is covered. We proceeded to do a content analysis categorizing items by topic,8 by language, origin and coverage of the media and by social problems. To assess place-problematizing practically, we created a speciﬁcally deﬁned dichotomous “social problem” variable with a “Yes/No” tag. Finally, we crossed these answers with the thematic evaluation associated with each place and how media named it. Doing this allowed us to determine how some themes (e.g. politics) were associated or not to a social problem, depending on the place to which they were ascribed (e.g. the region or one of its municipalities).

Finding News Producers and the Items Since there is a lack of comprehensive data describing Brussels’s media ecosystem, we had to conduct a prospective study in order to assess and build our sample. This part of the research involved mainly setting up an RSS feed aggregator and adding entities over time. This was done in four ways: (1) using Google search in multiple languages (mainly French, Dutch and English) and iterative keywords to find producers of news, (2) adding the websites of the various outlets of the big media companies in Belgium, (3) looking through key accounts on social media (Twitter and Facebook), and (4) crawling the collected URLs using the hyperlinks on the pages to find potential news producers. During this process, we assessed which sources produced textual news regularly and decided what to keep or delete. We kept institutional sources as they regularly produce news regarding their political territories. In Brussels, it is common for municipalities and other official bodies to update their websites regularly and send monthly magazines. They mostly produce content regarding local politics and public events but it is not rare to see more journalistic content in it (Domingo and Le Cam 2014). However, as results suggest (see results and Table 7) institutional websites’ coverage differs from others radi- cally. Results must therefore be interpreted carefully. We chose to exclude media outlets from foreign countries in order to focus on a more endogenous representation of Brussels (though we acknowledge that the “outsider look” could be the subject of an interesting comparison in a further study), as opposed to a European media representation, which could have obliged us to change or adapt our objective from Brussels local news to embrace coverage of EU issues. From this preliminary selection, we decided to exclude a quantity of specialized outlets, such as gender- and age-oriented, or purely culture and Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 entertainment websites. Furthermore, websites with only one page (such as showcase websites) were excluded as well, since there was no news content about Brussels to analyze. We also excluded political blogs, satirical news websites and websites with only an agenda page, such as those published by small cultural centers in Brussels. This was done to focus on websites that, at minimum, published periodically, had news sections and published actual news (not only self-promotion contents). Finally, we also excluded social network content (such as posts in groups and on pages) to keep a homogeneous content to analyze. Through this inductive process, our corpus came to consist of items published in an exhaustive set of media outlets that are part of the Belgian media ecosystem and produce news on Brussels. We assembled a comprehensive list of outlets, which constituted a full range of actors, independently of the professional status of the news producers, the business model adopted or the genre of format used to structure coverage (e.g. news stories, posts, opinion articles, etc.). In the end, this corpus (see examples in Figure 3) 10 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

FIGURE 3. Examples of items from producers selected with various origins.

allowed us to represent the diversity of the coverage of Brussels (see Tables 1–3), consisting mainly of traditional media (regional pages of national newspapers, local newspapers, public TV), alternative and hyperlocal media, personal blogs and institutional news producers. The sample presents a relatively even distribution of websites (in terms of their origin) between the daily press (11 percent), weekly and monthly press (16 percent), radio (18 percent) and institutional websites (15 percent), with a bigger proportion of online-ﬁrst/ only sources (31 percent) and a slight underrepresentation of TV channels (7 percent). Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 Content producers stem mainly from national sources (49 percent), local sources (21 percent) and metropolitan sources (18 percent). Sixty-one percent of them produce

TABLE 1 Origin of each news producer (N = 152)

Origin # Percent Daily press 17 11.2 Other press 24 15.8 Radio 27 17.8 TV 10 6.6 Web 47 30.9 Institutional 22 14.5 Other 5 3.3 BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 11

TABLE 2 Geographical coverage of each news producer (N = 152)

Coverage # Percent International 5 3.3 National 75 49.4 Metropolitan 28 18.4 Local 32 21.2 Other 12 7.9

Note: The linguistic division of the country pushes most “national” producers to focus on regional issues and cover the federal government, making their focus at the same time national and regional (here called “national”). The expression “metropolitan” refers to outlets covering the metropolitan area of the region of Brussels and its 19 municipalities, or at least multiple municipalities. “Local” refers to producers covering only one municipality or less (i.e. a neighborhood).

content mainly in French and 22 percent in Dutch. The rest of the sources write in other languages or are bilingual.9 After finding news producers, we had to elect news items. This step consisted in choosing one relevant news item from each website of our corpus. Because this study is transversal and encompasses a variety of online news producers and because we wanted to test this methodology, we decided to gather one story from each website to grasp the diversity of online media production about Brussels. We decided to collect only one item per producer in order to get a snapshot of what news about Brussels looks like at a given moment. This choice allowed us to provide a transversal look at online news production about Brussels. It allowed us to test our methodology and it makes the study reproducible to compare the sample with other periods (to assess the evolution of the phenomenon over time) or to analyze other news ecosystems. Nonethe- less, the choice of gathering one item per outlet was conscious and made to avoid getting lost by trying to become a diachronic study. The data collection therefore concentrated on the shortest period possible (we managed to gather all items between January 25 and January 27) to create the most hom- ogenous sample. This was done so to study what any individual could stumble upon if looking for news about Brussels online at that moment. This period can be considered Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 as “normal” in Brussels. Though we did not apply a specific method to find the “most normal days of the year,” we tried to choose a data collection period that was not peculiar in any form, such as a big international event, a catastrophe or a holyday. To gather one recent article from each outlet, we developed a strategy consisting of three steps. The first step involved (1) selecting the first article of the regional page of the

TABLE 3 Language of each news producer (N = 152)

Language # Percent French 93 61.2 Dutch 33 21.7 English 4 2.6 Other 22 14.5 12 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

website focused on Brussels. From the homepage of each website (e.g. “www.lesoir.be”)we simply looked at the dropdown menu, looking for pages marked as “Brussels.”10 We then took the most recent article. (2) If there was no regional page, we used the search engine of the website, typed “Brussels,” and choose the ﬁrst story that appeared in the results page. (3) Finally, if the website did not appear to have a search engine or when the search failed, we used Google and the search expression “Brussels site:[site’s URL]”and chose the ﬁrst article that appeared in the results. If Google returned no results, and therefore if none of these procedures worked, we excluded the website from our corpus. Since we dealt with a broad variety of outlets, we ended up with stories published on different dates: some of them on the same day we performed the data collecting; others published the previous days, weeks or months. For this reason, we decided to consider only the items from 2015 onwards (after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks, which are considered the starting point of this recent wave of terrorism in Europe) from which to trace this portrait of Brussels. In the end, our corpus consisted of 152 items. This may be considered a small sample, nevertheless the sample include a diversity of producers about Brussels online. It is comprehensive when it comes to Belgian websites producing regular news on Brussels. Furthermore, this is an exploratory pilot study with a focus on the creation of categories so that the study may be reproduced.

Data Encoding and Analysis To test our codebook, each researcher analyzed 20 random items (for a total of 40). After reviewing the categories and variables a first time, a second more formal pretest was performed with a corpus of 10 more items and inter-coder reliability was calculated. Vari- ables with a percent agreement of less than 0.80 were either recoded or deleted to ensure inter-coder reliability. With this final version of our analytical grid, the corpus was evenly distributed between the two researchers to gather and process the data. The analysis consisted in crossing the categories of analysis with control variables. With respect to place-naming, we first looked at the number of terms used to describe the spaces covered in the articles. We then crossed these data with control variables estab- lished during the monitoring phase of the study: (1) the language used by the producer, (2)

Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 its historical origin and (3) its geographical coverage. Finally, we looked back at some of the items and headlines characterizing municipalities as problematic in order to acquire a richer understanding of news place-naming and news place-problematizing, as well as to provide insightful examples. During the making of this study, we also met regularly to assess the research process itself and to reﬂect on whether or not this methodology would be a viable approach to study place-naming and place-problematizing.

Findings Place-Naming and Brussels: A Complex Terminology for (a) Complex Place(s) Brussels territory is characterized by such a high degree of complexity that the terminology used to describe it varies throughout items and categories of news producers. When it comes to naming place, an analysis of the 152 items reveals the array of terms used to BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 13

describe the territory (see Table 4). Eighty-six percent of the items collected mentioned the term “Brussels,” 41 percent mentioned at least one of the municipalities, including the “City of Brussels” (15 percent).11 Brussels is also described as a “capital” (21 percent), a city (17 percent) or a region (17 percent). Furthermore, 34 items (22 percent) mentioned at least 2 different terms to describe the territory (capital, city or region) and 7 used the 3 terms within the same item, as in the example below: The Region Brussels-Capital and the foundation Roi Baudouin wish to question a few of Brussels’ inhabitants around social cohesion in Brussels.Todoso[…], Brussels’ population has been strongly marked by the bombings in Paris as well as by the terror attacks perpetrated in the capital last March [, …] It was then that a reflection on the future of “living together” in Brussels was born in order to know how the inhabitants of the capital feel, what experience they have of their city or what is their vision of living together. (Vivreici.be, January 25, 2017, our emphasis) In addition, an unpredicted usage of the term “Brussels” was detected while coding. The research found that out of the five websites in our sample focusing predominantly on international issues, four were covering the European Union as one of its main topics of interest. Two of the four analyzed news pieces clearly used the term “Brussels” to refer to the Euro- pean Union or its legislative or executive power.12 These observations indicate that the complex nature of Brussels as a territory influences the names used to describe it. To further the argument, the crossing of results with control variables highlights this diversity of place-naming across news items. There were significant differences in the names chosen to describe the territory, depending on the language used by the producers. A higher proportion of items written in Dutch use the term “Brussels” (97 percent) than French (89 percent). However, a significantly lower proportion of items in Dutch mention the usual names to specify the place written about. This is consistent across the four terms “city” (NL = 6 percent, FR = 24 percent), “region” (NL = 9 percent, FR = 17 percent), “capital” (NL = 9 percent, FR = 28 percent) and “City of Brussels” (NL = 6 percent, FR = 17 percent). The same observation can be made at a more local level, as 27 percent of items in Dutch mention a municipality, while 39 percent of items in French did. This suggests that the political situation of Brussels (a mainly French-speaking city enshrined within the region of Flanders) complicates the usage of terms to cover it. Furthermore, a significant number of items mention the city of Brussels and/or the Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 other municipalities (41 percent of the items)—a telling number of them (32 out of 85) published by local media. Altogether municipalities are mentioned 113 times across all items.

TABLE 4 Terms used to deﬁne Brussels (N = 152)

Mentions of the terms

Term # Percent Brussels 130 85.5 Capital 31 20.4 City 26 17.1 Region 26 17.1 City of Brussels 23 15.1 Mention a municipality 62 40.8 14 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

This shows that online media cover the hyperlocal level. We found this hyperlocal focus in 60 percent of online-first producers. This was less prevalent in websites linked to television (30 percent) and radio (25 percent) channels. These findings show that there is a diversity of local and hyperlocal online news in Brussels (van Kerkhoven and Bakker 2014; Williams, Harte, and Turner 2014; Nielsen 2015) and that place matters to them as it does for legacy news content. They also concur with the fact that the terminology used to name Brussels varies from source to source. They highlight the difficulties encountered in portraying Brussels’s complex social, political and institutional situation, as producers propose various definitions of what Brussels is through place-naming. The next section further develops the idea that media portrays multiple faces of Brussels and its municipalities, making it a complex entity made up of multiple places.

The “Poor Crescent” of Brussels and Its “Problems” In the literature review section, we discussed the role of media in identifying and portraying a set of situations as social problems. Online news producers have the ability to pub- licize claims associated with a “problematic situation,” which reinforce representations by setting the public and political agenda (see Blumer 1971; Schneider 1985). It is not within the scope of this paper to rebuild this history, but rather to understand how media chooses to represent some situations as social problems (Best 2007) by privileging a problematic or “bad” coverage of some territories. The association of these two frames —territory and social problems—explains how parts of Brussels remain stigmatized. The analysis of Brussels’s coverage regarding social problems reveals how online news producers present municipalities. All in all, news about Brussels reports on problems in 39 percent of cases, while 61 percent of items do not mention any. As envisioned, the main topics related to the social problem variable are politics and government (78 percent), police and legal affairs (75 percent) and to a lesser extent, business (66 percent) and mobility (66 percent), while topics such as entertainment and culture appeared as not framing a problem (87 percent), suggesting that Brussels is a vibrant cultural capital that faces infra- structural, political and criminality-related issues13 (Table 5). Altogether, municipalities were mentioned 113 times in items discussing a social problem. The distribution of problems across Brussels’s municipalities indicates that they Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 are not the same when it comes to social issues. Data show that the municipalities with the highest number of mentions are the City of Brussels (23), Schaerbeek (19) and Molenbeek (14). After these come Ixelles14 (with 10 mentions), Anderlecht (9 mentions) and Saint-Gilles (6 mentions). The geographic distribution of mentions in news items is enlightening, as most news produced (and hence the discussion of social problems) revolves around the center of the city/region with a concentration in the municipalities of the so-called poor crescent (the ﬁve municipalities mentioned, plus Ixelles, which is adjacent to it) (Table 6). The six most referenced municipalities total 81 mentions—48 in items discussing a social problem and 33 in non-problematizing items. The next 13 municipalities are all mentioned less than 5 times and only total 32 mentions. Sixteen mentions relate to social problems, and the same number (16) to non-problematizing items (Figures 3–6). Municipalities across the “poor crescent,” so often associated with questions of multiculturalism (Le Cam and Domingo 2015), have a higher proportion of news items portraying a social issue. If the “City of Brussels” municipality shows a relatively even distribution of BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 15

TABLE 5 Social problems in news items by topics (N = 152)

Social problem

Theme # Percent Yes Percent No Percent Politics, government and war 27 17.8 21 77.8 6 22.2 Police, crime, courts and legal 25 16.5 19 76.0 6 24.0 Natural disaster, accident 1 0.7 1 100.0 0 0.0 Business, economics and ﬁnance 6 4.0 4 66.7 2 33.3 Sports 2 1.3 0 0.0 2 100.0 Entertainment and culture 39 25.7 5 12.8 34 87.2 Tourism 4 2.6 0 0.0 4 100.0 Mobility 6 4.0 3 50.0 3 50.0 Other 42 27.6 6 14.3 36 85.7

good news and bad news, the numbers grow for Anderlecht, Molenbeek, and especially Schaerbeek where only 4 items were detected that did not portray a problem compared to 15 items depicting one (see Figures 3–6). Moreover, in the 25 items regarding the negatively connoted topics of crime and police matters, municipalities of the poor crescent were mentioned 28 times (Saint-Gilles = 1, Anderlecht = 2, City of Brussels = 4, Ixelles = 5, Molenbeek = 7, Schaerbeek = 9). This is exempliﬁed in the following headlines: “Eight Searches Led in Brussels as Part of Terrorism Case” (Brusselstimes.com, January 25, 2017); and “The Terrorists of Brussels Wanted to Negotiate the Liberation of Nemmouche” (Lesoir.be, January 25, 2017). In some cases, place-problematizing is subtler. In the news item entitled “New Scandal with Brussels’

TABLE 6 Mentions of municipalities with regard to the social problem variable (N = 152)

Social problem variable Mentions # Yes No 1000 City of Brussels 23 11 12 1030 Schaerbeek 19 15 4 Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 1080 Molenbeek-St-Jean 14 8 6 1050 Ixelles 10 7 3 1070 Anderlecht 9 5 4 1060 Saint-Gilles 6 2 4 1190 Forest 4 2 2 1040 Etterbeek 3 0 3 1083 Ganshoren 3 2 1 1140 Evere 3 2 1 1150 Woluwé-St-Pierre 3 1 2 1160 Auderghem 3 3 0 1210 St Josse-ten-Noode 3 2 1 1090 Jette 2 1 1 1170 Watermael-Boitsfort 2 1 1 1180 Uccle 2 1 1 1200 Woluwé-St-Lambert 2 0 2 1081 Koekelberg 1 0 1 1082 Berchem-Ste-Agathe 1 1 0 16 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

FIGURE 4. Distribution of mentioned municipalities through news items.

Police about Roast Chicken” (Gva.be, January 25, 2017), a piece on police corruption in Brus- sels City and Ixelles, the last paragraph links the issue to another by stating that earlier in the month three police ofﬁcers were arrested for being drunk in a café in Schaerbeek. Another piece (“Police Escort Hundreds of Violent Fascists to Quiet Wake in Brussels,” Dewereldmorgen.be, March 27, 2016) also portrays the center as problematic by narrating how a group of neo-Nazis marched to the center of the city. It is only in the very last sen- tence that the municipality of Molenbeek is mentioned as the place of the next probable march of the group. Finally, crossing the social problem variable with the different types of sources yields interesting results (see Table 7). Daily press (77 percent), television (60 percent), web-ﬁrst Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 news sources (47 percent) and non-daily press (42 percent) describe Brussels and its municipalities as more problematic than radio (26 percent) or institutional sources (0 percent). Out of the 22 items from institutional sources, none picture Brussels or its municipalities as home of social problems. This could be related to the fact that institutional sources propose news items related to service information or events or that they might have an agenda in promoting Brussels as unproblematic. Furthermore, radio websites might report more social problems on their audio contents (and podcasts) than written pieces. These results indicate that different kinds of outlets online see, problematize and represent Brussels differently, though this should be explored further.

Discussion Throughout this research, we have explored ways to study how Brussels is depicted online and the images of the territory that are generated at a given moment. At ﬁrst glance, BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 17

FIGURE 5 and 6. Distribution of mentions for non-problematic items (left) and social problem items (right).

TABLE 7 Social problem in news items by origin of producer (N = 152)

Problem Total Percent Yes Percent No Percent Daily press 17 11.2 13 76.5 4 23.5 Other press 24 15.8 10 41.7 14 58.3 Radio 27 17.8 7 25.9 20 74.1 TV 10 6.6 6 60.0 4 40.0 Web 47 30.9 22 46.8 25 53.2 Institutional 22 14.5 0 0.0 22 100.0 Other 5 3.3 1 20.0 4 80.0

it might seem that local legacy media in the Brussels-Capital Region is scarce, and yet residents still manage to get news about the spaces they live in from a diversity of sources. Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 During the analysis, we came to appreciate the complexity of Brussels’s political system and equally complex news ecosystem, turning Brussels’s spaces into a complex place, or even, as some might argue, into an aggregate of complex places. If anything, the terminology they use to describe the territory as a region, a city, a collection of municipalities, the capital of the European Union or, more often than envisioned, as an undeﬁned entity, is emblematic of producers’ difﬁculties in designating and representing what exactly they are producing news about. The analysis of place-problematizing suggests that the municipalities of Brussels are not on equal footing in news producers’ eyes. Producers seem to portray the municipalities of the “poor crescent” differently from wealthier municipalities in the southeast and northwest of Brussels. Naturally, these results must be balanced with demographic and sociopo- litical data such as the fact that the municipalities of the “poor crescent” are more populated than richer municipalities, meaning that more newsworthy events might happen in such spaces, or that news producers might be more inclined to write about, 18 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

in or from those places. We do not wish to imply that these places do not host many social issues, nor that online news producers should not discuss them. We were, however, sur- prised by the very unequal distribution of topics of news production and wonder about the line between fair representation of a space and unfair stigmatization of specific places. Furthermore, findings suggest that there are variations in place-naming and place-problematizing depending on the kind of news producers. Though the institutional websites produce news as the monitoring showed, it appears that they do not problematize Brussels whatsoever, questioning what it is exactly that they are saying about the city. Online news producers hold a certain sway over how people envision, think of and act on social spaces. News not only reflects events happening at various locations, but also impacts the locations themselves. As Lindgren15 states, The negative stereotyping fostered by the high-proportion of crime-related articles that characterizes news coverage of the priority areas can potentially undermine residents’ willingness to become engaged in their ‘loser’ communities and/or reinforce the desire of those whose prospects do improve to move away as soon as they are able. (Lindgren 2009, 93) In this sense, online news producers, like professional journalists, are part of an interpretative community (Zelizer 1993) that has the ability, through news, to construct a vision of “us” and “them” and to portray places as problematic through place-naming and place-problematizing. If the findings presented in this pilot study are confirmed, place-problematizing of the poor crescent by news producers about Brussels might have harmful effects on individuals living in these municipalities. At this point of the research, our data do not allow us to make conclusions on the possible causes of place-problematizing. Studies in media and journalism studies suggest that journalists’ habitus usually reproduce dominant views on society (e.g. on problematic neighborhoods) (Champagne 1993). In consequence, they can reinforce social stigmatization. Gutsche (2014b) stated that journalists, as social elites, share and propagate particular ideologies on places. Another potential explanation is related to the practices and habits of online news producers. The time constraints and the need for content update could make it hard to consider alternative framings on covering certain topics. Further- more, professional journalists prioritize stories that require less investment of time and/ or resources (Lindgren 2009,93),butwehaveyettoresearchifitthecaseforall Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 online news producers. Finally, it would be interesting to explore the location of news producers (and more specificallyiftheyarelocatedina“good” or “bad” neighborhoods), to see if it could explain their views on Brussels’s geography. In this case, building a map combiningnewscoverageonBrusselsandlocationofnewsroomsaswellotherpro- duction sites could be an interesting strategy to better understand the place-naming and place-problematizing processes.

Conclusion In this paper, we crafted a methodological pilot study to test whether content analysis based on “social problems” analysis would work as a way to explore place-problematizing. We have tried to construct a theoretical and methodological apparatus that would allow an in-depth exploration of a heterogeneous corpus. The use of news place-naming and place-problematizing helped us analyze news place-representation as it happens. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 19

Combining online monitoring with content analysis afforded us the necessary tools to approach the diversity of online producers writing on, in and about Brussels. If one could argue that the number of items analyzed is low compared to other content analyses of news items, we contend that this exercise was fruitful in providing a picture of news production online at one moment in time, as well as methodological tool for the analysis of place-problematizing. The aim was to detail the methodology as thoroughly as possible so that this pilot study could be replicated. This methodology could be used to study other news ecosystems, cities or territories. It could also be used to compare multiple news ecosystems or compare various types of sources, such as international news media and more local sources. It could also be used to enrich the study of news production about Brussels by reproducing the data-gathering process over time (by creating “constructed week samples” or by reproducing the analysis over multiple time periods). We, however, deliberately chose not to get lost in the diachronic, which would have happened had we opted to study the changes in the production of news place-representation over time. This radical vision allowed us to solely provide a snapshot of what online news about Brussels looks like at a given moment—what one could have found by looking for news about Brussels online then. Future research could also focus on different geographical entities moving on from political geographies to neighborhoods in Brussels. If politically defined neighborhoods exist in Brussels, they are not known by many individuals by their official names, and therefore do not match how individuals (and hypothetically journalists) would call them. However, research on the links between space and place at the neighborhood level would be relevant, as long as it starts by identifying the various names of the neighborhoods (through monitoring, a survey, interviews or else). What’s more, research comparing how journalists name neighborhoods compared to politicians, activists and other citizens would tell us more about specific place-representation practices. Finally, further studies could also focus on particular case studies or events happening locally in Brussels to assess the processes that lead to such productions. In any case, the methodology developed for this exploration can now be expanded and reproduced. In this sense, then, we think this research matters and helps in understanding how news producers, along with other institutions, represent spaces, transforming them into places and influencing the meanings that citizens collectively construct about the world. Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank the LaPIJ (Laboratoire des Pratiques et Identités journal- istiques) at the ReSIC-ULB for allowing this research to happen and for providing a safe place to discuss and exchanges ideas, as well as the COMET at the University of Tampere for the feedback provided during the doctoral seminar. More generally, we thank those who have contributed to this paper by providing feedback and comments at the seminars or during informal moments.

FUNDING Fabio Pereira had a CAPES Foundation scholarship to fund his research in Brussels. Victor Wiard currently holds a grant from Innoviris (Brussels) to fund his research as well. No additional funding was provided to realize this research. 20 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors.

NOTES

1. Abbreviation of “Presse Quotidienne Régionale” for “French regional daily press.” 2. The term “pure player” is used (in English) by French speakers to describe web-native news outlets. 3. As Chantal Mouffe conceptualizes it. 4. For an overview of the main commonalities and differences in modern local news ecosystems, see Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s(2015) introductory chapter of the book, Local Jour- nalism: The Decline of Newspapers and the Rise of Digital Media. See the other chapters for analyses and comparisons of local news ecosystems. 5. The term referred to is croissant pauvre in French. 6. On the night of Friday, November 13, 2016, Paris suffered a terrorist attack involving gunmen and suicide bombers. They hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars almost simultaneously—leaving 130 people dead and hundreds wounded. Some of the attackers had been residents of the municipality of Molen- beek, Brussels. 7. On the morning of March 22, 2016, three coordinated suicide bombings occurred in Belgium: two at Brussels Airport in Zaventem and one at Maelbeek metro station in central Brussels. Thirty-two civilians and three perpetrators were killed, and more than 300 were injured. These attacks were related to the Paris events and some individuals were linked to the ﬁrst attack in Paris. 8. We based our seven categories on a more exhaustive list of topics applied to content analysis (see Lynch and Peer 2002). While testing our research instrument, we added “Urban Mobility” as a new category, since preliminary observations made it seem relevant to our case. We also merged cultural themes with the entertainment category (so that it became “Entertainment/Culture”). 9. Some public institutions in Brussels are required by law to have bilingual websites. 10. During this process, we made sure to take into account the language(s) used for each site. For example, we used “Bruxelles” for French-speaking sites, “Brussel” for Dutch-speaking Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 and “Brussels” for English-speaking websites. 11. A relatively easy way to spot when the term “city” of Brussels is used to describe the central municipality is the use of the capital C, as in the expression “the City of Brussels has decided …”. For the presentation of the analysis, we use the English terms to facili- tate reading, but as our sample is multilingual, original terminology varied. Fourteen percent of the items in our sample did not mention the term but still ended up in our sample. This is due to the fact that some news pieces talked about one of the city’s municipalities without mentioning the city explicitly (but using the term in the metadata or tags), which made it even more difﬁcult to understand which territory was referred to in the piece. 12. As explained in the methodology, these four websites were removed from the content analysis sample because they focused on EU issues. 13. Topics of sports and tourism did not frame issues either, but results must be interpreted carefully due to the low number of items regarding these topics. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 21

14. Ixelles is a large municipality south of the city center, which is home to the French- and Dutch-speaking universities of Brussels and the multicultural “Matongé” neighborhood. 15. Lindgren stated this in a similar study done on Toronto Star newspaper’s news coverage of 13 troubled neighborhoods in Toronto, designated as “priority areas”.

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Victor Wiard (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), ReSIC (Centre de recherche en information et communication), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. Email: [email protected] ORCID http:// orcid.org/0000-0002-2968-6224 Fábio Henrique Pereira, Faculdade de Comunicação, Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brazil. Email: [email protected] ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-0167

APPENDICES 1. Variables and categories used for this study

Id of Type of variables Var Description Categories Coding variables Var1 Coder 1 = researcher 1, 2 = researcher 2 Var2 Id of news items # 1 to 10 Descriptive variables Var3 Date of publication (DD/MM/YYYY) Var4 Language of news item 1 = NL, 2 = FR, 3 = EN, 4 = else Var5 Numbers of words recoded 0–100, 101–200, 201–300, etc. Var6 Theme of news item 1. Politics, government and war 2. Police, crime, courts and legal 3. Natural disaster, accident 4. Business, economics and

Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 ﬁnance 5. Sports 6. Entertainment and culture 7. Tourism 8. Mobility 9. Other Issue variable Var7 Item depicting an 1 = yes, 2 = no unresolved issue, problem Terminology to Var8 Item mentions “Brussels” 1 = yes, 2 = no describe Brussels Var9 Item mentions “capital” 1 = yes, 2 = no Var10 Item mentions “city” 1 = yes, 2 = no Var11 Item mentions “region” 1 = yes, 2 = no Var12 Item mentions a 1 = yes, 2 = no municipality

(Continued) BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 25

(Continued)

Id of Type of variables Var Description Categories Var12′′ 1st municipality mentioned 99 = No mention 2 = Anderlecht 3 = Auderghem 4 = Berchem-Sainte-Agathe 5 = Bruxelles (ville de Bruxelles / Bruelles-Ville) 6 = Etterbeek 7 = Evere 8 = Forest 9 = Ganshoren 10 = Ixelles 11 = Jette 12 = Koekelberg 13 = Molenbeek-Saint-Jean 14 = Saint-Gilles 15 = Saint-Josse-ten-Noode 16 = Schaerbeek 17 = Uccle 18 = Watermael-Boitsfort 19 = Woluwe-Saint-Lambert 20 = Woluwe-Saint-Pierre09 Var12′′ 2nd municipality mentioned Var12′′′ 3rd municipality mentioned Var12′′′′ 4th municipality mentioned

2. Social problems in news items by terms used

Crossing variables “issue” and the terms mentioned Terms All No Percent Yes Percent Brussels 130 72 55.38 58 44.62 Capital 31 15 48.39 16 51.61

Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 City 26 14 53.85 12 46.15 Region 26 12 46.15 14 53.85 Mention of a municipality 62 32 51.61 30 48.39 No municipality mentioned 90 61 67.78 29 32.22 26 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA

3. Social problems in news items for the 6 most mentioned municipalities

Schaerbeek, n =19 Issue Yes 15 47.37 No 4 21.05 City of Brussels, n =23 Issue Yes 11 47.83 No 12 52.17 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, n =14 Issue Yes 8 57.14 No 6 42.86 Ixelles, n =10 Issue Yes 7 70.00 No 3 30.00 Anderlecht, n =9 Issue Yes 5 55.56 No 3 44.44 Saint-Gilles, n =6 Issue Yes 2 33.33 No 4 66.67 Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018

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