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 article-level social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

Media Roles in the Online News Domain: Authorities and Emergent Audience Brokers

“…Although they have much smaller structures, even a blog by a single author can reach thousands of people today. Notably, the web has radically lowered the cost of distribution (Cage et al, 2015). Their reach and also their relevance, especially during major political events, are a proxy to understand their ability to challenge the monopoly of media authority, which was once exclusively attained by legacy outlets Majó-Vázquez, Zhao, Nurse, & Nielsen, 2017).…”

“…Anderson, Bell, & Shirky, 2012;Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, & Nielsen, 2019). At the same time, digital-only competitors make it more difficult for legacy media across geographies to engage a new loyal public, especially when it comes to paying for content and attracting a young target audience (Cage, Viaud, & Herve, 2015;Pew Research Center, 2015;Suárez, 2020).…”

The Recycling of News in Swedish Newspapers: Reused quotations and reports in articles about the crisis in the Swedish Academy in 2018

“…The increased reliance of newspapers on recycling strategies, especially in online news production, has been widely discussed. Most recent studies either describe journalists' own conceptions of changed journalistic practices (from interviews, surveys, and ethnographic studies; e.g., Boczkowski, 2010;Manninen, 2017;Phillips, 2010;Thurman & Myllylahti, 2009), analyse quantitatively to what extent news are recycled, or both (e.g., Cagé et al, 2019;Erdal, 2010;Hendrickx, 2019;Lewis et al, 2008b;Lund et al, 2009;Saridou et al, 2017;Vonbun-Feldbauer & Dogruel, 2018;Wheatley & O'Sullivan, 2017). The overall picture emerging from these studies is that of more news being produced over time, but largely because more recycling is taking place.…”

“…For decades, journalists have -at least to some extent -relied on press releases and news agency material to create news stories (e.g., Boumans, 2018;Martin, 2015). As newsrooms are being allocated increasingly less time and money to produce more news than before (e.g., Lewis et al, 2008a;Moloney et al, 2013), this tendency to recycle texts originally produced by others has become more accentuated (e.g., Cagé et al, 2019). Social media platforms make it additionally possible to find newsworthy pieces of text in new places not limited to press releases or news agencies.…”

A method for measuring investigative journalism in local newspapers

“…Measuring investigative content is challenging, because by definition, investigative articles bring to light new information that was not previously public. Clustering methods, counts of entities or predetermined phrases, and latent topic models, which work well for labeling fixed categories of media coverage such as wars, pandemics, sports or weather and have been employed extensively in previous work (8)(9)(10), are for this reason, ill-suited to measuring the production of investigative news. To date, approaches to measuring investigative content have largely relied on human coders or keyword searches (e.g., refs.…”