Do Newspapers Matter? Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence From the Closure of The Cincinnati Post
By Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Miguel Garrido. 2013
112 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post's former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished with time. The authors exploited a difference-in-differences strategy and the fact that the Post's closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some noncausal explanations for their results. Although their findings are statistically imprecise, they suggest that newspapers—even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed—can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8098463c3d9075a03b932ba52ccdb5415be3e760
Citations in the corpus
- Financing dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on public finance (2020, unknown): “Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido (2009) show that local elections are less competitive, and incumbent politicians are more likely to retain office when there is less newspaper competition.”
- Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior (2018, unknown): “Declining access to quality local news is harmful to voter behavior and responsive governance, leading to more corruption (Arnold, 2004; Besley, Burgess, & Prat, 2002; Campante & Do, 2014; Strömberg, 2004) and lower voter turnout (Schulhofer-Wohl & Garrido, 2013).”
- Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit (2014, unknown): “From a comparative perspective, our results are also relevant for the debate on competition and localism in the US.(48) Indeed, the present analysis provides supporting evidence to the claim that promoting localism and competition in the market for news may have positive effects on electoral partici”