Abstract

This paper addresses three basic issues in the economics of the newspaper industry. The first issue is the meaning of the distinction between local and non-local newspapers. The notion of revealed local competitiveness is defined and a method for empirically assessing it is applied to Italian departments in 1999 and 2003. The second issue regards the determinants of the size of the local press in a given area (under the definition of local competitiveness mentioned above). Since the choice on the part of a publisher to issue a local newspaper, rather than a non-local one, is after all a choice of specialization, it is reasonable to expect market size to be the main factor influencing the relative weight of local press in a given area. The paper builds on this basic intuition and qualifies it by considering: a) different measures of market size; b) factors possibly reinforcing or compensating for the influence of market size; c) deeper determinants of market size itself (demographic and education-related variables). The empirical discussion is based on the above mentioned sample of Italian departments. Finally, the paper provides a description of the Italian newspaper system from the local vs. non-local perspective which partly reinterprets the usual distinction between local and national newspapers, according to the revealed local competitiveness approach.