Internet Shock to the Local Newspaper Audience and Effects on Political Coverage

• In Event: Traditional News Industry Changes and Their Political Consequences

Abstract

The massive effects of the internet on the American news industry and how voters consume it have been widely studied. In an era of already high choice for media consumers, access to broadband vastly expanded the availability of print news. Local newspapers have suffered as the internet has become more central to the political news ecosystem, previous studies have found that the expansion Craigslist had immediate effects on ad revenue and therefore on staffing and coverage. In this paper, I argue that these studies fail to account for the changing composition of the local newspaper audience post-broadband when explaining changes in the political coverage of these papers. High political interest consumers would be more likely to select out of their local newspaper in favor of better resources national news outlets that they can access online, leaving local newspapers with a more politically disengaged audience to target. I expect that this should shift news coverage in these papers towards local stories, and more negative and sensationalist coverage of the national politics stories that are published. Using broadband rollout data from the FCC and zip-code level circulation data for local newspapers from the Alliance for Audited Media, I test the effect of broadband rollout on audience composition using a staggered difference-in-differences approach. Then, I employ topic models and sentiment analysis on full-text archives of these newspapers from NewsBank to test changes in what gets covered and how it gets covered in response to the broadband-induced audience shift. These expected findings will help us understand how legacy media outlets change in response to technology-driven competition for their audience and document how the internet has reduced the quality of political coverage voters consume, even for those who remained offline.

Author

• David McGrath, New York University