Impact of conglomeration on local television news

Abstract

This research project studied the relationship between mergers & acquisitions among the corporate ownership of news-producing local television stations in the United States and the quality of the journalism those stations produce as measured by the resources they are left to operate with. This was measured with quantitative data from a national survey of news directors paired with qualitative data from five semi-structured interviews with news directors representing a cross-section of parent companies and market sizes.