EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Production of Information in an Online World

Julia Cagé, Nicolas Hervé and Marie-Luce Viaud

The Review of Economic Studies, 2020, vol. 87, issue 5, 2126-2164

Abstract: News production requires investment, and competitors’ ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media’s incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In this article, we build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news event, trace the timeline of each story, and study news propagation. We provide new evidence on online news production. First, we document high reactivity of online media: one quarter of the news stories are reproduced online in under 4 min. We show that this is accompanied by substantial copying, both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, which may constitute a severe threat to the commercial viability of the news media. Next, we estimate the returns to originality in online news production. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with article-level social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

Keywords: Internet; Information spreading; Copyright; Social media; Reputation; L11; L15; L82; L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdz061 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Production of Information in an Online World (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: The Production of Information in an Online World (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: The Production of Information in an Online World (2015) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:5:p:2126-2164.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:5:p:2126-2164.