Do Newspapers Matter? Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence From the Closure of The Cincinnati Post

Abstract

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.

Notes

¹The 1909–1910 figure is from Busterna and Picard (1993). Today's precise count depends on the definition of competing newspapers. Cities with major competing, separately owned dailies include Boston; Charleston, WV; Chicago; Detroit; Fort Wayne, IN; Los Angeles; New York; Salt Lake City; Trenton, NJ; York, PA; and Washington. Denver, Seattle, and Tucson, AZ, all dropped from the list in 2009, with the closures of the Rocky Mountain News, Post-Intelligencer, and Citizen, respectively. Honolulu fell from the list in 2010 with the merger of the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin.

²Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, quoted in Starr (2009).

We are grateful to employees of The Cincinnati Post and the E.W. Scripps Company, several of whom requested anonymity, for helpful conversations. They are not responsible in any way for the content of this article. We also thank Alícia Adserà, Anne Case, Taryn Dinkelman, Ying Fan, Douglas Gollin, Bo Honoré, James Schmitz, Jesse Shapiro, numerous seminar participants, and the editors and referees of the Journal of Media Economics for valuable suggestions, and Joan Gieseke for editorial assistance. Miryam Hegazy, Tony Hu, and Xun Liu provided excellent research assistance. A version of this article previously circulated as Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Working Paper 686, and an earlier version circulated under the title “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence From the Closure of The Cincinnati Post.” The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve System, or Bloomberg Government.

³We do not analyze elections in the Ohio suburbs because the Post largely withdrew from covering these suburbs as early as 2001 (Philipps, 2007; Rutledge, 2007), implying that the closing itself would not be expected to have much impact in Ohio. In results not reported here, we apply to the Ohio suburbs the same methods used in this article to analyze the Kentucky suburbs and estimate a negative effect of the Post's closing on political activity in Ohio, but the effect is statistically insignificant and much less precisely estimated than the already imprecise estimates in Kentucky. (We do not analyze elections in Ohio around the time that the Post reduced its coverage there because the timing of the coverage reduction in Ohio was not predetermined and may have been endogenous. We cannot use Ohio as a control group for Kentucky because the two states hold municipal elections in different years.)

⁴See Sacher (2011) for a review of studies examining consumer and advertiser substitution between newspapers and other media.

⁵According to the Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the Post's Ohio and Kentucky editions had total Monday-to-Friday circulation of 246,323 in 1977. The decline was linear with time. The Enquirer's weekday circulation in 1977 was 190,407.

⁶Newspapers in a JOA also combine their printing and delivery operations to exploit economies of scale, but publishers can obtain these savings without an antitrust exemption so long as they continue to compete in advertising and subscription sales.

⁷An existing literature investigates the effect of JOAs on newspaper content and profits (see, e.g., Busterna & Picard, 1993).

⁸If Gannett had merely thought that profits from going it alone would exceed its share of JOA profits, it could have tried to renegotiate the agreement. Romeo and Canes (2012) give examples of such renegotiations.

⁹Full disclosure: The first author worked from 1998 to 1999 at the Birmingham (Ala.) Post-Herald, a Scripps newspaper that participated in a JOA and later closed.

¹⁰The Post's central role in Scripps' history may have motivated the company's reluctance to close the paper. Company namesake Edward Willis Scripps made his reputation in the 1880s when he bought the Post and built it into what was, at the time, Ohio's largest daily (Stevens, 1968; Baldasty, 1999). The family-controlled media chain's headquarters remain in Cincinnati, and many executives once worked in the Post newsroom.

¹¹The main experimental study is Gerber, Karlan, & Bergan (2009), which uses a randomized controlled trial to measure the effect of receiving a newspaper subscription. However, the impact of receiving a newspaper can differ from the impact of the newspaper's existence if readers tell nonreaders about stories or if politicians behave differently when a newspaper might write about them.

¹²Our sample excludes the former city of Latonia Lakes, Kenton County, which was dissolved in 2006.

¹³We exclude mayoral elections because only three municipalities in our sample held mayoral elections in 2008.

¹⁴We cannot base our analysis on circulation data because independent dealers delivered the Post and the paper had no centralized list of subscribers' addresses. We also cannot use the Audit Bureau of Circulations' zip-code-level data because some towns in our sample share zip codes. Regardless, because broadcasters and bloggers often quote newspaper stories, the number of stories a paper publishes may matter more than the number of subscribers: One subscriber with a well-read blog or popular broadcast can multiply a story's impact many times. Such repetition may help explain how the Post could have a meaningful political impact despite its low circulation.

¹⁵ http://www.newslibrary.com

¹⁶ http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/enquirer/search.html

¹⁷Many other outcomes are also potentially of interest but would be difficult to study in the context of Kentucky municipal elections. For example, we cannot study party affiliation, because nearly all candidates are nonpartisan. We also cannot study victory margins, because most races involve multiple candidates competing for multiple seats, with voters allowed to cast multiple votes, so that strategic voting is possible and vote totals do not necessarily reflect the strength of voters' preferences.

¹⁸We obtained the 2004 through 2008 records by contacting county election supervisors and downloaded the 2010 records from the Kentucky State Board of Elections (http://www.elect.ky.gov/results). The elections board Web site does not provide municipal election results before 2010.

¹⁹We find marginally statistically significant evidence that the Post's share was higher in communities where a larger share of the voting-age population is Black or ages 18 to 34.

²⁰We measure the fraction who are ages 18 to 34 as of 2000, rather than the fraction who will reach ages 18 to 34 by 2008, because the number of teenagers in 2000 will be a poor predictor of the number of young adults in 2008 if different communities are particularly attractive to people of different ages.

²¹If postshare _it is the Post's measured share in community i in year t, we find that corr(postshare _it ,postshare _is ) is close to 1 but does not depend on t – s for t ≠ s. This result is consistent with the idea that the Post's measured share consists of the Post's true importance to the community plus a serially uncorrelated classical measurement error, i.e., postshare _it = trueshare _i + u_it with i.i.d. u_it .

²²In an earlier version of this article that examined only the short-run impact of the Post's closing, we also considered specifications that accounted for the limited range of the dependent variables. (For example, campaign spending is left-censored at zero, and no matter how big or small incumbents' advantage is, the probability of an incumbent victory cannot exceed one or fall below zero.) We found that the results were generally similar to those obtained with ordinary least squares estimation of (1). However, the limited-dependent-variable estimators do not let us use an instrument for Post_Share _i , so we do not use them in this version.

²³We cannot check this assumption about population growth because the Census Bureau has no population counts after 2000 for communities as small as those we study.

*Significant at 10% level.

**Significant at 5% level.

***Significant at 1% level.

*Significant at 10% level.

**Significant at 5% level.

***Significant at 1% level.

*Significant at 10% level.

**Significant at 5% level.

***Significant at 1% level.

²⁴Because the Enquirer's total stories about the Kentucky municipalities fell slightly from 2006 to 2008, the increased coverage of towns with a high Post share tells us that coverage fell in towns with a low Post share. However, because we do not know what would have happened to Enquirer coverage if the Post had not closed, this finding does not prove that the Post's closure caused the Enquirer to reduce coverage of those towns.

*Significant at 10% level.

**Significant at 5% level.

***Significant at 1% level.