In recent years, the news media landscape has been characterized by two distinct patterns: a decline in newspaper circulation, and a persistent degree of ideological slant in newspapers’ position. We explore a possible nexus between these two phenomena by means of a model that extends some recent developments in the empirical spatial theory of voting to the reader’s choice with respect to newspapers. We assume that ideological proximity to a newspaper affects the choice made by a consumer to read it. Newspapers will then compete among themselves to maximize their respective readerships by finding an optimal placement in the ideological space. However, newspapers can also decide to target readers of a specific type. As we will show, this is a crucial step to take into consideration. We empirically apply our model to the Italian case. We show that Italian newspapers appear largely to behave as theoretically expected. However, the “ideological force” behind this conclusion must be sought in newspapers’ competition with respect to that subset of readers which can be identified as regular ones. This result highlights a possible mechanism driving a persistent newspaper ideological slant in time of lower newspaper circulation.

近年来，新闻媒体的格局具有两种截然不同的模式：报纸发行量的下降以及报纸立场上意识形态的持续倾斜。我们通过一个模型来探索这两种现象之间的可能联系，该模型将投票的经验空间理论的一些最新发展扩展到读者对报纸的选择上。我们假设意识形态上与报纸的接近会影响消费者对阅读报纸的选择。然后，报纸将通过在意识形态空间中找到最佳位置来相互竞争，以最大限度地提高各自的读者群。但是，报纸也可以决定针对特定类型的读者。正如我们将显示的，这是要考虑的关键步骤。我们根据经验将模型应用于意大利案例。我们发现，意大利报纸似乎在很大程度上符合理论上的预期。但是，必须在报纸竞争中寻找可以归类为普通读者的那部分读者的结论这一“背后的思想力量”。这一结果突显了在报纸发行量较低时可能导致持久的报纸意识形态偏见的可能机制。