Presentation delivered during 9th Seminar on Media and the Digital Economy (21-22 March 2019). http://fsr.eui.eu/event/annual-scientific-seminar-on-media-and-the-digital-economy-9th-edition/

1. Local News Online: Aggregators,
Geo-Targeting and the Market for
Local News
FSR Communications & Media Scientific Seminar
Florence: March 21-22, 2019
Lisa George
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Christiaan Hogendorn
Wesleyan University

2. Digital News Consumption

3. Digital News Consumption

4. Mediated News Consumption

5. Mediated News Visits
News visits by a geographically representative sample of about 45,000 US households,
2002-2011. Source: ComScore Web Behavior Database aggregated by authors.
Mediated News Consumption

6. Unique Outlets

7. Does aggregation raise or
lower news consumption?

8. Local News

9. Digital News Consumption

10. Policy Issue
Antitrust, Ownership Rules,
Cross-ownership Ban

11. Supply?

12. Number of Newspapers

13. Demand?

14. Facebook Local News

15. This Paper

16. This Paper
How does aggregation of local news
headlines affect local news consumption?

17. Nutshell
• Natural experiment in local new aggregation
• Identification - imputed Google News intensity
• Identification - Google vs. Yahoo intensity
• Aggregation increased local news visits, but a
modest change from a low base
• Aggregation increased weekly consumption
variety, but not source discovery

18. Literature
• Supply Side View: Aggregators as Pirates
• Diminish incentives for content production
• Content costly, bundling cheap
• Esfahani-Jeon (2016), Rutt (2011)
• Chiou & Tucker (2017)
• Demand Side: Aggregators as Bundlers
– Reduce cost of locating content, improve matches
– Content cheap, bundling & matching costly
– George-Hogendorn (2012); Blogs (Shirky, Gans)
– Athey & Mobious (2012)

19. Geo-targeting
• Passive geo-location of digital devices
• Reduces consumer search cost
• Expands advertising market
• No opt-in provision for privacy protections

20. Google News Experiment
• 2006: Google News launch
• 2008: Limited “opt-in” personalization
• 2010: Page redesign
• Single-column news layout
• Added strip with local news
• Added some “opt-in” customization
• Location identified automatically

21. Before: June 28, 2010
(no local news)

22. After: July 2, 2010
(permanent local news)

23. Data
• Household Data
– ComScore Web Behavior Database
– Complete history of page views for 36,876 households inside of
MSA’’s over 47 weeks of 2010
– News visits and local news visits aggregated to household-
domain-week
• News Domains
– Raw ComScore includes 718,000 top-level domains visited at
least 5 times in 2010.
– News identified from directories & Google News scrape
– Final sample includes 8,240 news outlets, 2,626 having
appeared on Google News.

24. Intermediation
• Two identification strategies
– Imputed Google News intensity
– Treatment (Google News) & control (Yahoo)
households
• Google News Visit
– Outlet linked that day on Google News
• Daily scrape of Wayback pages
– Visit referred by Google
• Robustness Specification
– Google vs. Yahoo referral intensity

25. Pictures (Google News)

27. Visits to Top Outlets
Top (blue) line – all news
visits
Bottom (red) line – Google
News Links

28. Do Google News Appearances
Increase Outlet Traffic?
A link on Google News before re-design increase
non-local visits by 3.3%, with no effect on local visits.

29. Local Visit Shares
Top Local Outlets

30. Household Treatment Measures

31. Estimation
• Yit is local news consumption household i week t
– Number of local news visits
– Probability of a local news visit
– Share of visits to local news sites
• X is treatment
– Imputed Google News intensity
– Treatment & control specification
– Google & Yahoo intensity

34. Local News Visits

35. Local News Visits

36. Variety

37. Robustness

38. Outlet Effects
• Effect of local news aggregation on
local news consumption is modest.
• How consequential is aggregation
for domains?
• Evidence & limitations.

41. Competition

42. Extensions/Conclusions
• Intermediaries are an important feature of
news markets
• Need for theory and empirical work to
understand their role in consumption and
competition
• Search & transaction costs matter online
• Results suggest low consumption of local
news is demand-driven