The Medium is Global, the Content is Not: The Role of Geography in Online Newspaper Markets

Previous research suggests that the print newspaper's local nature and the Internet's boundary-transcending capacity enable online newspapers to operate in local and long-distance markets. A census of online newspapers in 4 states was conducted via email to examine the existence of and differences between the 2 markets. Results show that the long-distance market is a substantial sub-market that constitutes about one third of the online readership, while the local market still outweighs the long-distance market in terms of usage and online newspapers' targeting intention.