Calendrier du 03 mai 2016
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 03/05/2016 de 12:30 à 13:30
Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8
JULIA CAGE (SCIENCE PO)
The Production of Information in an Online World
écrit avec Nicolas Hervé (INA) ; Marie-Luce Viaud (INA)
Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce. Who are the main providers of original news in the online world, and how are they rewarded for this? What are the benefits of breaking out a story, and how does information propagate? This paper addresses these issues by exploiting a unique dataset including all online content produced in French language by the universe of general information media outlets in France during year 2013. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news story, trace the timeline of each story and perform a plagiarism detection algorithm to distinguish between original reporting and copy-and-paste. We then merge this content data with data on investment in news gathering and daily audience to investigate the costs and benefits of information production. We first show that about 50% of all online information is copy-and-paste, with large variations across media outlets. We then highlight the specific role played by the French news agency: AFP has the largest newsroom and is the main provider of original information, reflecting the use of an adequate copyright system. We next find a positive relationship between the number of journalists and the quantity of original news production. Using daily-level variations, we finally show that producing original news leads to a statistically significant increase in online audience, but that the magnitude of this audience effect is very low. This illustrates the need to develop new paywall or copyright models.