Pin-ups and Journalists: A Model of Media Market with News and Entertainment

Abstract

In this article, the authors model a market for news where two sources compete for the audience. Individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their tastes for the news and entertainment. The authors model endogenously the sources' choices concerning the news accuracy and the level of entertainment, together with the audience's behavior, which includes reading one or two sources as well as not reading at all. The authors provide a rigorous setting explaining why individuals get informed according to a Bayesian behavior. Then, when some individuals read more than one source, they show that the competition is relaxed and the incentives to invest in quality lacks. In this respect, pluralism, defined as the possibility to jointly resort to more than one paper, does not automatically guarantee a higher press quality.