Department of Economics

I propose a methodology to isolate the effect of competition on media content using local newspaper closures as an exogenous change in competition to closured newspapers’ competitors. I define five topical metrics and construct a specialized categorization scheme to measure newspaper content over time. By comparing content across the periods before and after a newspapers’ competitor closes, I hold all factors that may affect content constant save the level of competition in the market and chronological time. Following the theoretical model proposed by Perego and Yuksel (2020), I hypothesize that decreasing competition should incentivize general content and disincentivize specialized content. I test my hypothesis on a case-study of 13 local newspapers in California over the period from 2000 to 2020. I am unable to differentiate the effect of decreasing competition from other time-related factors, and therefore cannot make a definitive conclusion from the limited data. However, my methodology and categorization scheme may be applied a more extensive dataset further test whether the effect of competition on local newspaper content can be observed and isolated from other factors.