Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues

Abstract

Michael Ostrovsky was coeditor for this article. We thank three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions. We thank

Media competition, information provision and political participation: Evidence from French local newspapers and elections, 1944–2014

“…of products increases with market size, but that the market does not offer much additional variety as it grows larger. Angelucci and Cagé (2019) document a negative effect of the introduction of advertising on French television on the amount of journalistic-intensive content produced by national newspapers, as proxied by the size of their newsroom. George (2007) also uses data on reporters when studying how differentiation and variety increase with concentration in markets for daily newspapers.…”

“…To measure empirically the quality of newspapers, I follow the existing literature and use the number of journalists on staff (see e.g. Hamilton, 2004;Berry and Waldfogel, 2010;Fan, 2013;Angelucci and Cagé, 2019;Cagé et al, 2017). The advantage of this measure is that it allows me to use the panel dimension of the dataset to exploit the timing of entries and exits for identification.…”

“…Recent papers in the field model the market for news as a two-sided market and study how advertising affects content (see e.g. Ellman and Germano, 2009;Angelucci and Cagé, 2019;Shiller et al, 2017). Taking into account different values advertisers may place on different readers is beyond the scope of this paper.…”

“…2 I use this data to quantify the effect of entry on the quality of newspapers; following the existing literature, I use the number of journalists on staff as my first proxy for newspaper quality (see e.g. Hamilton, 2004;Berry and Waldfogel, 2010;Angelucci and Cagé, 2019;Cagé et al, 2017). I supplement this data for recent years (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012) with measures of newspaper content, in particular of the size of newspapers (number of articles and of words).…”

“…Angelucci and Cagé (2019) andAngelucci et al (2017) exploit historical data to examine how, respectively, the introduction of advertising on television in France and the introduction of television in the United States affected newspaper content. They document a decline in quality following increased competition.Please cite this article as: J. Cagé, Media competition, information provision and political participation: Evidence from French local newspapers and elections, 1944-2014, Journal of Public Economics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2019.104077.…”