Is public service broadcasting a threat to commercial media?

<jats:p> This article asks to what extent public service broadcasting’s online news service resembles that of commercial media. The context of this inquiry is claims of ‘out-crowding’ facing public service broadcasters across Europe. In Norway, commercial players in this debate accuse the public service broadcaster, NRK, of being too similar to competitors in the private sector for commercial operators to attain sustainable revenues in the online realm. To ascertain the extent to what these claims are warranted, this article compares NRK’s online content with that of nine commercial competitors in national and local markets, using a hybrid methodological approach combining quantitative content analysis with Latent Dirichlet allocation, analysing in excess of 115,000 documents. Findings show that commercial operators resemble each other more than they do NRK, indicating closer competition in the commercial segment than between the public service broadcaster and market players. </jats:p>