The coexistence of mass and elite media in the market

In many countries, markets for news are characterized by the coexistence of sources of information which differ as to their contents (in particular, the entertainment/information mix). In this paper we model a market for news where two advertising-supported sources compete for the readers. Readers are divided into classes which differ regarding the information- processing skills and regarding the preferences for contents different from news. We show that there exists an equilibrium where one of the reports is read by all the population (mass source), while the second one is read only by one class of readers (élite source). Moreover, there exists a group reading both the mass report and the élite report. We also show that the ratio between news and other contents is lower in the mass source relative than the other one.