From the Nieman Journalism Lab:
Q&A: Clark Medal winner Matthew Gentzkow says the Internet hasn’t changed news as much as we think
“It remains true that the fixed costs of producing good news are still really high. It’s easy to put up a website, but to produce original reporting news content is still really expensive.”
The Clark Medal is one of the most prestigious awards in all of academia, awarded to the “American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” (Names you might know among previous winners: Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, Joseph Stiglitz, Steven Levitt, and Larry Summers.) This year’s honor went to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Gentzkow is a pioneer in the field of media economics; his work, often co-authored with Chicago Booth’s Jesse Shapiro, takes advantage of previously unavailable data on audience, content, and media impact. Austan Goolsbee, also a Chicago Booth professor, commented on Gentzkow’s work in The New York Times:
“Before the Internet and advances in computing power, this couldn’t be done,” Mr. Goolsbee said. “You couldn’t analyze the data and you wouldn’t have had the ambition to try.”Some of Gentzkow’s most talked-about research has been on bias in news sources — he’s written papers around measuring slant, whether readers consume diverse or confirmatory news, and whether there is a demand for biased news in the market. He’s looked at the impacts of television on children and on voting behavior, and he’s has studied online advertising.
Going forward, Gentzkow said he’s interested in looking at more international media — he’s focused on finding a comprehensive data set for global media content. He’s also excited about the potential for data created by geocoding and cellphones, as well as studying media impact on the individual level — maybe even with electrodes. We talked about the cost of information gathering, the demand for quality news, and the obstacles to gathering data; here’s our lightly edited conversation.
Caroline O’Donovan: Congratulations! I think I read that you now have a one-in-three shot of winning a Nobel. My question is: Can you build a predictive model that tells us what year you’re going to win the Nobel?Matthew Gentzkow: I think I should refrain from speculating on that. The scary implication of this kind of thing is you don’t want to be remembered as the one guy who won this prize and then didn’t do anything very interesting afterward. One might think, if you’re lucky enough to win an award like this, then you can kick back and relax. But it doesn’t really feel like that. It feels like now I have a lot of work to do to try and live up to this vote of confidence from my colleagues.O’Donovan: This is one of those wunderkind awards that specifically exists to make you feel like you have a lot of work left to do.Gentzkow: I don’t know if 38 years old still counts as a kind, but I’m happy if it does. I think there is some notion in awards like this of recognizing people while they’re still working, as opposed to once it’s all done.
O’Donovan: But joking aside, the whole idea of all this new, deeper data being available — that’s not going away, right? So there’s certainly a lot left for you to get into.Gentzkow: Oh, absolutely. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be involved in economics — to be involved in science broadly. There’s more and more data everyday. I think what everybody will be able to do 10 years from now will make this year look kind of puny. The challenge is trying to keep up, keep close enough to the frontier, keep learning new things, keep up with all these smart graduate students who are getting their PhDs and know a lot more than I do. Try to keep producing new research. It’s challenging, but certainly the data and the technology are going to keep getting better, and that makes it exciting.
O’Donovan: To dial it back a little bit, what made you decide that media economics was something you were interested in? I assume it wasn’t, The data around this issue is going to explode, and I want to be the guy that was known for taking advantage of that. So how did you get interested? What were the big questions that were driving you?Gentzkow: It was certainly not as far-sighted as that. The immediate thing was: I’m a graduate student, I need to find a topic for a dissertation so I can get my degree and get a job. So for me, like a lot of people, it came out of this process of casting around, looking for topics, talking to your advisor. Once I stumbled on it, it was a really good fit. There was a mix of interesting, rich economics that it seemed like other economists might find interesting, but also this broader set of political and social questions. Media is in some sense a market like any other market, but it’s interesting above and beyond the usual reasons because of the way it effects the political process. It’s something that the typical American spends three or four hours a day doing. I never worked in business — I didn’t do consulting or investment banking. Some of the things people traditionally work on, I didn’t have exposure to. Newspapers and TV and the Internet were things I felt like, as a consumer, I had some intuition about, thought about, found myself asking questions about. It was a good fit for me to work on something that had already piqued my curiosity....MUCH MORE
