Quantifying Information Density in World-City Newspapers of Record and a Suburban Newspaper (1999–2018)

Economists and geographers describe world cities not only as major urban centres but also as influential hubs of economic, cultural, geographic, and technological innovation. Building on this idea, several scholars argue that world cities constitute autonomous ecosystems increasingly detached from their national contexts. This paper investigates whether such an ecosystem can be detected through patterns of information behaviour, thereby challenging geography as the only explanatory factor. We analyse a multilingual dataset of eight newspapers headquartered in a sample of Western world cities: seven newspapers of record (The Times, The Irish Times, Le Figaro, Die Welt, NZZ, La Stampa, El País) and one suburban newspaper: Chicago Daily Herald—covering the years 1999–2018. We treat the suburban newspaper as an exploratory study case, to be expanded in future work. Then, in dialogue with Franzosi’s concept of narrative units, we extract and quantify unique Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) triplets per token per year as a proxy for information density. The analysis reveals a consistent increase in unique SVO triplets across the seven newspapers of record, suggesting a convergent pattern of information density among these outlets. By contrast, the Chicago Daily Herald shows a declining trend despite its geographic location within a world city. This divergence challenges the assumption that location alone explains informational homogeneity. The results also extend research on the Theory of Social Acceleration, indicating that newspapers of record reflect increasing informational activity, whereas our suburban outlet does not. We discuss possible confounding factors such as editorial policies, content scope, and media materiality.