Cross-ownership means better TV?

Here’s the headline: The audience gets more news from TV stations owned by companies that also own a newspaper in the same market. According to an article in Broadcasting & Cable, research done at the University of Missouri-Columbia found that “cross-ownership of broadcast outlets and daily newspapers in the same town has a positive impact on the quality of local news coverage.”

Professor Jeff Milyo’s study compared the local news content of cross-owned TV stations to other network-affiliated stations in the same market and found:

• Local TV newscasts for cross-owned stations have on average one to two minutes more news coverage than non-cross-owned stations, or 4-8 percent more news;
• Cross-owned stations have 7-10 percent more local news than non-cross-owned stations;
• Cross-owned stations offer 25 percent more coverage of local and state politics than non-cross-owned stations.

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