The rise of the internet has upended numerous industries, but none more so than news production. The connectivity fostered by digitization has been accompanied by the emergence of content aggregation, the proliferation of fake news, and the extended geographic reach of industry leaders, all of which have served to hollow out local reporting capacity. In this work, we examine the result of changes wrought by the internet on an outcome of theoretical and practical significance: corruption. Inasmuch as newspapers are viewed as an important investigative arm of local communities, it is possible that corrupt local actors will be emboldened in their absence. To test this hypothesis, we employed a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting the phased closure of major daily newspapers across the country. Our results indicate a significant and positive correlation between federal corruption charges and newspaper closures. Further, we observed no evidence that the rise in online news vendors or the democratization of the press ameliorates this effect. This suggests a key issue with the increased geographic reach of digitized firms in the form of “information blindness” to local issues.

中文翻译：

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没有消息就是坏消息：互联网、腐败和第四阶层的衰落


互联网的兴起颠覆了许多行业，但最重要的是新闻制作。数字化促进的连通性伴随着内容聚合的出现、假新闻的扩散以及行业领导者地理范围的扩大，所有这些都削弱了当地的报道能力。在这项工作中，我们研究了互联网带来的变化所带来的具有理论和实践意义的结果：腐败。由于报纸被视为当地社区的重要调查机构，如果报纸缺席，腐败的当地行为者可能会更加肆无忌惮。为了检验这一假设，我们采用了双重差分法，利用了全国主要日报的分阶段关闭的情况。我们的结果表明联邦腐败指控与报纸关闭之间存在显着的正相关关系。此外，我们没有观察到任何证据表明在线新闻供应商的崛起或媒体的民主化会改善这种影响。这表明数字化企业地理覆盖范围扩大的一个关键问题是对当地问题的“信息盲目性”。