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The Production of Information in an Online World: Is Copy Right?

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Cage

    (Département d'économie)

  • Nicolas Hervé

    (Institut national de l'audiovisuel)

  • Marie-Luce Viaud

    (Institut national de l'audiovisuel)

Abstract

This paper documents the extent of copying and estimates the returns to originality in online news production. 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 unravel 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 minutes. Second, we show that this comes with extensive copying: only 33% of the online content is original. Third, we investigate the cost of copying for original news producers. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with article-level social media statistics, we find that readers partly switch to the original producers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Cage & Nicolas Hervé & Marie-Luce Viaud, 2019. "The Production of Information in an Online World: Is Copy Right?," Sciences Po publications 2019-05, Sciences Po.
    • Handle: RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/3tcpvf3sd399op9sgtn8tq5bhd
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Inés Moreno de Barreda & Gilat Levy & Ronny Razin, 2017. "Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: Media Power via Correlation of News Content," Economics Series Working Papers 836, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    2. Kennedy, Patrick & Prat, Andrea, 2017. "Where Do People Get Their News?," CEPR Discussion Papers 12426, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Charles Angelucci & Julia Cagé & Michael Sinkinson, 2020. "Media Competition and News Diets," NBER Working Papers 26782, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Milena Djourelova, 2020. "Media persuasion through slanted language: Evidence from the coverage of immigration," Economics Working Papers 1720, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Internet; Information spreading; Copyright; Social media; Reputation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software

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