The Production of Information in an Online World

Abstract

News production requires investment, and competitors' ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media's incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In this article, we build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news event, trace the timeline of each story, and study news propagation. We provide new evidence on online news production. First, we document high reactivity of online media: one quarter of the news stories are reproduced online in under 4 min. We show that this is accompanied by substantial copying, both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, which may constitute a severe threat to the commercial viability of the news media. Next, we estimate the returns to originality in online news production. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with articlelevel social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues

“…These two findings suggest that-relative to local newspapersnational newspapers reacted to the drop in advertising revenues by producing less journalistic-intensive content. To the extent that the size of the newsroom is a good proxy for news quality (see, e.g., Hamilton 2006;Berry and Waldfogel 2010;Fan 2013;Cagé 2017;Cagé, Hervé, and Viaud 2017), our results highlight a positive relationship between advertising revenues and quality of information. Also, we study the front page content of a subsample of newspapers and find suggestive evidence that national newspapers decreased their provision of hard news following the introduction of television advertising.…”

“…Effect on "Quality".-Two features of newspapers have been repeatedly used in the literature as measures of newspaper quality (or at least production of journalistic-intensive content): the number of journalists and the so-called newshole (the amount of space in the newspaper devoted to anything but advertising) (see, e.g., Hamilton 2006;Berry and Waldfogel 2010;Fan 2013;Cagé 2017;Cagé, Hervé, and Viaud 2017). 51 Anderson and Waldfogel (2015) for instance note that "(i)n newspapers, some of the direct input cost measures-page length and staff size-are directly suggestive of quality."…”

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

“…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.…”

“…Furthermore the internet increases the relative importance of these fixed costs: on the internet, the cost of paper and distribution approach zero. Obviously this does not mean that the advent of the internet has not affected the provision of information; with the notable exceptions of Seamans and Zhu (2017) and Cagé et al (2017), there is little empirical evidence on how media outlets adjust their content in response to increased competition in an online world. But this means that the amount of information 41 Rubado and Jennings (2019), in their study of newspapers in California, find that when there are fewer reporters who cover an area, fewer people run for mayor, and fewer people vote.…”

“…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).…”