Management Information Systems Quarterly
Abstract
Declining circulation and advertising revenue have led many newspapers to cut costs by reducing in-house staff and relying more on wire content. In-house production provides unique content, while wire (non-exclusive) content offers broad coverage at a lower cost. Using data from a regional U.S. newspaper, we examined how the mix of in-house and wire content affects subscription decisions. To address reader-side selection bias, we used local precipitation as an excluded variable to indirectly randomize readers’ exposure to the content mix. We found that a 1-percentage-point increase in the share of in-house articles raised daily subscriptions by 0.024 percentage points (≈9% of baseline) and by another 0.009 percentage points (≈4% of baseline) under a paywall. Against this overall trend, wire business and sports articles also increased conversion, suggesting opportunities for selective sourcing. Effects were weaker for local readers and for visitors from social media. Finally, readers from aggregators responded to in-house content and paywalls much like direct visitors, indicating that differentiation and paywalls remain effective even as readers turn to aggregators to discover news.