2025/01/24 by Marcel Garz, Märt Ots · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Media Influence and Politics #Media Studies and Communication #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/joc/jqae053
openalex publication_date 2025/01/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
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.