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The focus of this article is to understand the determinants of negative, positive, or neutral tone in campaign news coverage. Much of the extant literature suggests, to some extent, the negativity bias often seen in political news stems from profit making objectives. This article asserts that news outlet ownership structures and economic incentives, coupled with political context, influence the likelihood of positive, neutral, or negative tone in campaign news. The findings presented herein suggest that corporate, chain, and nonlocal ownership all have consequences for campaign news tone. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

The focus of this article is to understand the determinants of negative, positive, or neutral tone in campaign news coverage. Much of the extant literature suggests, to some extent, the negativity bias often seen in political news stems from profit making objectives. This article asserts that news outlet ownership structures and economic incentives, coupled with political context, influence the likelihood of positive, neutral, or negative tone in campaign news. The findings presented herein suggest that corporate, chain, and nonlocal ownership all have consequences for campaign news tone.

"A comprehensive, trusted core text on media's impact on attitudes, behavior, elections, politics, and policymaking, Mass Media and American Politics is known for its readable introduction to the literature and theory of the field, and for staying current with each new edition on issues of new and social media, media ownership, the regulatory environment, infotainment, and war-time reporting. Written by the late Doris Graber--a scholar who has played an enormous role in establishing and shaping the field of mass media and American politics--and now lead by Johanna Dunaway, this book has set the standard for the course"--

Though people frequently use mobile technologies for news consumption, evidence from several fields shows that smaller screens and slower connection speeds pose major limitations for meaningful reading. In 'News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era', Johanna Dunaway and Kathleen Searles demonstrate the effects of mobile devices on news attention, engagement, and recall, and identify a key cognitive mechanism underlying these effects: cognitive effort. They advance a theory that is both old and new: the costs of information-seeking curb participatory behaviors unless the benefits outweigh them. For news consumers in the mobile era, for example, mobile devices increase the time, economic, and cognitive costs associated with information-seeking. Only for a small few do the benefits of attending to the news on mobile devices outweigh the costs.

In recent years, local media in the U.S. have faced increasing economic precarity, and many newspapers have been purchased by hedge funds and private equity firms. How do investment owners shape the newspapers they acquire? We document the shift in ownership and its impact on the number and type of journalists that local newsrooms employ. Using over 13,000 digitized media directory pages, we measure the newsrooms of 211 major newspapers from 2005 to 2022. We estimate that the acquisition of a newspaper by an investment owner reduced the paper's newsroom by nine reporters and editors compared to newspapers that remained under other ownership, a cut equivalent to 14 percent of the average newspaper's staff. These cuts were concentrated among positions focused on general assignment and political reporting. Our findings indicate the rise of investment owners has accelerated the decline of local newspapers.

Smartphones are expanding physical access to news and political information by making access to the internet available to more people, at more times throughout the day, and in more locations than ever before. But how does the portability of smartphones – afforded by their small size – affect cognitive access to news? Specifically, how do smartphone-size screens constrain attentiveness and arousal? We investigate how mobile technology constrains cognitive engagement through a lab-experimental study of individuals' psychophysiological responses to network news on screens the size of a typical laptop computer, versus a typical smartphone. We explore heart rate variability, skin conductance levels, and the connection between skin conductance and the tone of news content. Results suggest lower levels of cognitive access to video news content on a mobilesized screen, which has potentially important consequences for public attention to current affairs in an increasingly mobile media environment.