WHAT KIND OF COMMODITY IS NEWS

U.S. news organizations, both print and broadcast, are moving from practices in which "professional" journalists define what is newsworthy toward letting the market decide. The trend has generated much debate, but little from a theoretical perspective. This article seeks to provide some conceptual tools for thinking about how news will fare as a market-driven product. The analysis concludes that those who argue that market forces will improve journalism have not carefully examined the nature of news with market theory-microeconomics. In fact, microeconomic theory suggests that commodities like news are likely to engender opportunism on the part of news organizations.