Benevolent Billionaires? Evaluating the Effect of Wealthy Owners on Local News

• In Event: Changes in Local News and Their Political Impacts

Abstract

The economic decline of local news has led to a recent trend of high-profile billionaires from outside sectors purchasing newspapers. Given the importance of local news for political accountability and representation, we provide a framework for evaluating billionaire owners that focuses on the amount and quality of local news across textual, visual and social media content. We apply this framework to an analysis of changes in the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune after being acquired in 2018 by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire who vowed to invest heavily in his newsrooms. Using a series of automated tools for the analysis of visual and textual content as well as novel datasets comprising the daily front pages of and official tweets by these newspapers between 2017 and 2019, we find evidence that Soon-Shiong’s ownership resulted in increases in high quality, local journalism compared to other newspapers. However, we also find evidence of increased efforts to garner subscriptions and cover entertainment news, suggesting seemingly civic-minded billionaires may also prioritize content less normatively desirable for local politics. Our results both align with and add nuance to scholarship highlighting the potential harm caused by billionaires at the helm of news outlets. We conclude by encouraging future studies of local media owners–billionaires and otherwise–to also incorporate visual and textual analysis when evaluating ownership changes.

Authors

• Allison M.N. Archer, University of Houston

• Michelle Torres, UCLA