Media consolidation and news content quality
Marcel Garz; Märt Ots · 2025 · Journal of Communication
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
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 computation
Abstract by Marcel Garz; Märt Ots, Journal of Communication (2025) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.1093/joc/jqae053