中文摘要
新闻生产需要投资，且竞争对手挪用报道的能力可能会降低媒体提供原创内容的激励。然而，在线新闻生产中几乎没有对知识产权的法律保护，这引发了在线复制程度以及提供原创内容激励的问题。在本文中，我们构建了一个独特的数据集，将2013年期间法国新闻媒体产生的所有在线内容与新的微观受众数据相结合。我们开发了一种主题检测算法，用以识别每个新闻事件，追溯每条报道的时间线，并研究新闻传播。我们提供了关于在线新闻生产的新证据。首先，我们记录了在线媒体的高反应度：四分之一的新闻报道在不到4分钟内即被在线复制。我们表明，这伴随着大量的复制，无论是在广延边际还是集约边际上，这可能对新闻媒体的商业可行性构成严重威胁。接下来，我们估计了在线新闻生产中的原创性回报。利用文章层面的变异以及媒体层面的日受众数据，结合文章层面的社交媒体统计数据，我们发现原创内容生产者倾向于获得更多读者，从而缓解了由复制引发的新闻采集激励问题。
Abstract
Abstract News production requires investment, and competitors’ ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media’s incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In this article, we build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that identifies each news event, trace the timeline of each story, and study news propagation. We provide new evidence on online news production. First, we document high reactivity of online media: one quarter of the news stories are reproduced online in under 4 min. We show that this is accompanied by substantial copying, both at the extensive and at the intensive margins, which may constitute a severe threat to the commercial viability of the news media. Next, we estimate the returns to originality in online news production. Using article-level variations and media-level daily audience combined with article-level social media statistics, we find that original content producers tend to receive more viewers, thereby mitigating the newsgathering incentive problem raised by copying.