From Alden Global Capital to Sinclair Media, tales of corporate media takeovers of local news outlets — and their chilling effects — are everywhere. A new study published late last month in New Media & Society journal provides further evidence of the devastating consequences of corporate ownership.

The authors of the study looked at a sample of 31 corporate-owned papers and 130,000 articles published by these outlets before and after they were acquired.

The publications they examined ranged from The Denver Post (whose parent company was acquired by Alden Capital in 2010), the New York Daily News (initially acquired in 2017 by Tribune Publishing and then four years later by Alden), LA Weekly (acquired by Semanal Media LLC in 2017), and 28 papers in California published by Digital First Media (also owned by Alden).

Here’s an overview of what the study found:

  1.  Acquisition leads to a significant, but not disproportional, decrease in the volume of local content produced by local newspapers; 
  2. Coverage of local places in the periods following acquisition is significantly more concentrated than coverage in the periods prior to acquisition;

     

  3. Articles produced to be shared across regional hubs of newspapers are significantly less local—and discursively more national—than articles unique to a given newspaper.

Read the full article about local news acquisitions by Shraddha Chakradhar at NiemanLab.