Media consolidation and news content quality

Abstract

News organizations have been under financial pressure to streamline their activities for decades. Critics argue that this pressure undermines the quality of news, posing a severe threat to democracy. However, the effects of media consolidation on news quality are theoretically ambiguous and empirical evidence is scarce. To address this gap, we study the case of the Swedish newspaper industry between 2014 and 2022, a period where more than half of the country’s newspapers changed their owners. We collect over 2 million articles from 108 newspapers and apply state-of-the-art computational methods to create theoretically grounded, fine-grained measures of news content quality. Our results indicate that mergers are associated with slight increases in content quality. However, we also find evidence of content homogenization, as merging newspapers tend to slightly decrease their provision of local news, while relying more on content shared with co-owned newspapers.