Media Competition and News Diets

Charles Angelucci, Julia Cagé and Michael Sinkinson

No 26782, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Technological innovations in content delivery, such as the advent of broadcast television or of the Internet, threaten local newspapers’ ability to bundle their original local content with third-party content such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television – with its initial focus on national news – affected local newspapers as well as consumer news diets in the United States. We develop a model of local media and show that entry of national television news could reduce the provision of local news. We construct a novel dataset of U.S. newspapers’ economic performance and content choices from 1944 to 1964 and exploit quasi-random variation in the rollout of television to show that this new technology was a negative shock in both the readership and advertising markets for newspapers. Newspapers responded by providing less content, particularly local news. We tie this change towards increasingly nationalized news diets to a decrease in split-ticket voting across Congressional and Presidential elections.

JEL-codes: D4 L11 L15 M37 N72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cul, nep-his and nep-pay
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as Charles Angelucci & Julia Cagé & Michael Sinkinson, 2024. "Media Competition and News Diets," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, vol 16(2), pages 62-102.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Media Competition and News Diets (2024)
Working Paper: Media Competition and News Diets (2022)
Working Paper: Media Competition and News Diets (2022)
Working Paper: Media Competition and News Diets (2020)
Working Paper: Media Competition and News Diets (2020)
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