How Does the Media Environment Affect Readership?

• In Event: Journalism and Journalists

Abstract

Most research on news consumption focuses on the increase in the personalization of news feeds, the so-called ‘Daily Me.’ This paper contrasts this emphasis with evidence that when the online media environment shifts significantly in content, media diets are manipulated accordingly. This paper deploys a news aggregator app in which content is manipulated on the concentration of different categories of news, such as soft and hard, to understand how the mix of news impinges on voters’ demand for news, readership, and knowledge. The experiment is a patient-preferred trial in which part of the subjects’ pool is allowed to self-select into treatment, while the rest is exogenously assigned a newsfeed. This procedure allows the unpacking of the heterogeneous effects existing between self-selectors and non- self-selectors. The results show that the effect of changes in the media environment on news diets is significant as readership is only minimally affected by individual tastes. Specifically, a high soft newsfeed leads to a decline in the probability of hard news consumption of 36% among soft and hard news lovers alike. Analogously, a diet of mostly hard news leads to an equally strong readership of hard news. These results provide new evidence of the effects of the media environment on news diets with implications for democratic competence.

Author

• Alessandro Vecchiato, New York University