Who Owns the Online Media?

Ulrich Matter and Philine Widmer

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Ownership matters for the media's watchdog role. We map the ownership networks behind thousands of online news outlets in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The networks reveal who is ultimately responsible for the news: for over half of the outlets, a single entity. The rest sit behind multi-layered structures, making responsibility hard to trace. Market concentration, measured comparably across countries, is largely low to moderate. Looking at content, we find that co-owned outlets report more similarly, even within fixed outlet pairs, as ownership changes -- not least in the U.S., where reader demand is often thought dominant.

Date: 2026-08
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