Local Media Concentration

Abstract

Where companies compete against each other across the country, one must analyze an industry's market structure on a national scale. But in other situations, the relevant geographic markets are not national or international but local. This chapter examines local media concentration trends for several local media over a period of twenty years. The relevant industries of local mass media that are analyzed are: radio stations, television stations, newspapers, city magazines and periodicals, and cable television operators. The following, also considered, are also local distribution media, although of a different kind and dynamics: local wireline telephone networks and cellular mobile networks. Here, the local market is defined as the city itself. Since there are many hundreds of cities large and small in the United States, and it would be impractical to seek the media concentration trends for each, thirty markets are chosen to be representative of their categories. All of the seven local media are then averaged by using weights based on their revenue volumes.