Media Competition and News Diets / Charles Angelucci, Julia Cagé, Michael Sinkinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Angelucci, Charles.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Cagé, Julia.

Sinkinson, Michael.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26782.

NBER working paper series no. w26782

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2020.