No News Is Bad News: The Role of Government in News Markets in the Age of Aggregators and AI

Welfare economic theory seeks the justification for government intervention in markets, in market failure, and in distributional issues. An analysis of the market failures that exist in a specific industry or market can not only provide justification for government regulation or other kinds of intervention in general, but it can also suggest which type of intervention or regulation is optimal from a welfare economic perspective. This chapter addresses the question of how the emergence of news aggregator platforms and the introduction of generative AI in news production have affected the market failures that constitute the core problem underlying private investment in news production. The focus of the analysis is on the public good character of news and the positive externalities of news production. The question addressed is: Have the consequences of these existing market failures become more prominent or have they been resolved by these developments? Based on this analysis, the chapter discusses how this informs policy concerning these developments.