Abstract
Technological innovations like broadcast television and the internet challenge local newspapers’ business model of bundling their local content with third-party content, such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television affected newspapers and news diets in the United States. We construct a dataset of newspapers’ economic performance and content choices from 1944 to 1964 and exploit quasi-random variation in the rollout of television to show its negative impact in the readership and advertising markets. Newspapers responded by reducing content, particularly local news. We tie this change to increased party vote share congruence between congressional and presidential elections.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 62-102 |
| Number of pages | 41 |
| Journal | American Economic Journal: Microeconomics |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2024 |
Funding
*Angelucci: MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (email: cangeluc@mit. edu); Cag\u00E9: Department of Economics, Sciences Po Paris (email: [email protected]); Sinkinson: Yale School of Management, Yale University (email: [email protected]). John Asker was coeditor for this article. The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable advice and suggestions provided by seminar audiences at the Berlin Applied Micro Seminar, Columbia University, the FCC, Imperial College, Harvard/MIT joint IO Workshop, INSEAD, London Business School, London School of Economics, the University of Mannheim, Microsoft, the NYC Media Workshop, Stanford University, the Toulouse School of Economics, the Universitat de Barcelona, and Wharton. We are also grateful to conference participants at the 19th CEPR-JIE Applied IO Conference, the HEC Montr\u00E9al-CIRANO-RIIB Conference on Industrial Organization, the Petralia Workshop 2017, the 15th Annual Media Economics Workshop, the IAST Workshop on \u201CInformation, Communication, and Knowledge in Historical Perspective,\u201D the 4th Rome Junior Conference on Applied Microeconomics, and the Social & Political Economics Conference at John Hopkins. This paper particularly benefited from discussions with Cl\u00E9ment de Chaisemartin, Ruben Enikolopov, Lisa George, Doh-Shin Jeon, Sarah Laval, Simone Meraglia, Andrea Prat, Jonah Rockoff, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. We thank Luca Bassem Abdul Hay, Matteo Di Bernardo, Paul Berthe, Shelley Han, Jameson Lee, Ondre Padgett, Timothy Rickert, Arjuna Sakae Anday, Rachel Tosney, and, more particularly, Nicolas Longuet Marx and Jett Pettus for outstanding research assistance, and Yannick Guyonvarch for his precious help with the didmultipl eGT analysis. Julia Cag\u00E9 thanks the French National Research Agency (ANR) for funding (reference: ANR-17-CE26-0004-01), and the Sciences Po\u2019s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). All errors remain our own.
Keywords
- D72
- L25
- L82
- M37
- N42
- N72
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Economics, Econometrics and Finance