For decades, governments in a number of countries have sought to safeguard public-interest journalism through media subsidies. Yet, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such measures remains limited. This study examines the impact of media subsidies in the Swedish context. Drawing on comprehensive content-analytical data for nearly all subscribed newspapers and detailed records of subsidy allocations between 2014 and 2022, we propose and evaluate two normative benchmarks: (1) whether subsidized newspapers provide a genuine public-interest alternative to non-subsidized outlets, and (2) whether within-newspaper changes in subsidies affect content characteristics. Our results show that subsidized newspapers offer similar levels of journalistic quality and local news – and even higher shares of original content – than their non-subsidized counterparts. We also find that changes in subsidies do not affect content characteristics in the short run but remain anchored in professional norms and editorial standards, which suggests that Swedish media subsidies act primarily as stabilizers of public-interest journalism rather than stimulants of content.

The concentration of news media has spurred concerns about their ability to protect the marketplace of ideas integral to the functioning of democracy. Based on new research, Marcel Garz and Mart Ots discuss why media consolidation may not lead to lower journalistic quality but still affects society through a decline in local news and original content.

Ingress: Samtidigt som ägarkoncentrationen har ökat på den svenska mediemarknaden har kvaliteten ökat på nyhetsmaterialet. Det visar världens största vetenskapliga studie av nyhetskvalitet. Men utvecklingen har skett på bekostnad av den lokala mångfalden och frågan är vem som bevaka kommunala och lokala makthavare, vars beslut har en direkt påverkan på medborgarnas vardag.

Marketing practices are often criticised for manipulating people. However, the academic literature does not offer a clear consensus on what constitutes manipulative marketing and when it should be considered unethical. Relevant terms and concepts are often used interchangeably, which makes it difficult to assess the phenomenon and provide ethical guidelines for practitioners. This article develops an integrative framework to assess manipulation in marketing in clear distinction from other forms of influence, including coercion, intimidation, nudging, and persuasion. We identify intent/negligence and lack of consent as key conditions for manipulation, while deception and exploitation are mechanisms through which it takes place. In our framework, marketing tactics are categorised along two dimensions of the influence spectrum: freedom of choice and transparency of information. We provide a flowchart that can guide decision-makers through the process of assessing the characteristics and ethical implications of their actions.

International courts lack traditional enforcement mechanisms. Scholars theorize that compliance with human rights rulings is therefore often driven by domestic processes, including political mobilization and parliamentary agenda setting. A necessary condition underlying these processes is attention to the rulings which is in part expected to be mediated by media attention. However, these conditions have not been explicitly addressed by the existing compliance literature. In this paper, we assess the impact of media attention to rulings by the European Court of the Human Rights on the likelihood of their implementation, using a novel dataset of case-specific news coverage. Exploiting exogenous variation in media attention caused by competing newsworthy events, we find that the probability of compliance increases, the more coverage a ruling receives. Our findings indicate that domestic news media play a key role for compliance with international courts.

News organizations have been under financial pressure to streamline their activities for decades. Critics argue that this pressure undermines the quality of news, posing a severe threat to democracy. However, the effects of media consolidation on news quality are theoretically ambiguous and empirical evidence is scarce. To address this gap, we study the case of the Swedish newspaper industry between 2014 and 2022, a period where more than half of the country’s newspapers changed their owners. We collect over 2 million articles from 108 newspapers and apply state-of-the-art computational methods to create theoretically grounded, fine-grained measures of news content quality. Our results indicate that mergers are associated with slight increases in content quality. However, we also find evidence of content homogenization, as merging newspapers tend to slightly decrease their provision of local news, while relying more on content shared with co-owned newspapers.

Researchers often employ signaling theory to explain the effect of entrepreneurial communication on fundraising success. This focus on signaling can lead researchers to overlook alternative explanations for why communication affects fundraising, resulting in incorrect conclusions. An empirical test of whether a signaling mechanism is a good explanation for an observed relationship would help remedy such problems. We illustrate this idea by reexamining a relationship that has frequently been attributed to signaling, namely, the positive effect that updates in crowdfunding have on fundraising success. We find no support for a signaling mechanism based on a dataset of 5,908 campaign-day observations nested in 175 Kickstarter campaigns. Instead, an alternative explanation, indicating that updates provide affective stimuli, fits the data better. We provide guidance for empirical substantiations of signaling mechanisms in entrepreneurial fundraising with implications for the discussion on the boundaries of signaling theory.

Entrepreneurs can benefit from the communities they build. Therefore, many entrepreneurs create online communities that allow self-selected stakeholders, such as customers, crowd investors, or enthusiasts, to interact with the venture and other like-minded individuals. However, research on how entrepreneurs can successfully engage community members and grow such online communities is only slowly emerging. In particular, it is unclear if, how much, and which content entrepreneurs should contribute to foster engagement in different types of communities and which role these community types play in the community's overall growth. Based on a longitudinal case study in the video game industry, we first theorize and show that-depending on the community type-both too much and too little entrepreneur-provided content fails to leverage community engagement potential and that different communities require more or less diverging content. We then theorize and show that community growth is largely driven by engagement in open communities, such as those hosted on social media. We outline the implications this has for entrepreneurs, our understanding of online communities, and entrepreneurial communities more generally. How can entrepreneurs engage and grow different types of online communities?Managing online communities is crucial for many entrepreneurs. However, different community types, open and core, play different roles and require different content and growth strategies. Core communities, such as those hosted on online forums, respond well to less but more diverse content, whereas open communities on social media drive overall community growth with more but less diverse content. Entrepreneurs need to find the right balance and pay attention to the tipping point of content provision, as too much content might endanger community member engagement. By understanding the dynamics of online communities, entrepreneurs can effectively nurture engagement and optimize their efforts for long-term success. Investing resources wisely in content production, considering the costs involved, can be beneficial for new ventures seeking sustainable community growth.

We study the effect of media coverage on individual behavior during a public health crisis. For this purpose, we collect a unique dataset of 200,000 newspaper articles about the Covid-19 pandemic from Sweden-one of the few countries that did not impose lockdowns or curfews. We show that mentions of Covid-19 significantly lowered the number of visits to workplaces and retail and recreation areas, while increasing the duration of stays in residential locations. Using two different identification strategies, we show that these effects are causal. The impacts are largest when Covid-19 news stories are more locally relevant, more visible and more factual. We find larger behavioral effects for articles that reference crisis managers (as opposed to medical experts) and contain explicit public health advice. These results have wider implications for the design of public communications and the value of the local media.

The implications of rising parliamentary representation of populist parties have been thoroughly studied but little is known about the impact of populist state leaders on party positions. In this article, we study mainstream parties' strategic responses when a populist takes over as the leader of a nation. We use content-analytical data and large language modelling to measure positions expressed in manifestos from parties from 51 democracies between 1989 and 2018. Employing methods for causal inference from observational data, we find that right-wing populist state leaders induce mainstream parties to differentiate their positions on multiculturalism, possibly leading to polarization of the party system. Under left-wing populist leaders, mainstream parties adopt more homogenous or differentiated positions, depending on the policy category and other contextual factors. Parties are generally more responsive in emerging than advanced countries and in presidential than parliamentary systems.