To figure out how the investors obtain the information will help us to understand the financial market. Media, as the information intermediary, plays an important role in the process of information transmission in the stock market. With the development of the Internet, new media becomes one of the main platforms for investors to get financial information. Unlike traditional media, the large portals collect and provide a large number of, even all, news from the various news source for the investors. Investors need not subscribe to the newspaper or watch the TV to get information like before and they can get the information from the internet easily and quickly.
On the other hand, the reprints on the internet could disseminate financial information to broad investors. So the internet brings a great challenge for mass media. Although the internet provides these advantages for the new media, the mass media still co-exist with media and provides information for investors. The existing literature indicates that how investors obtain information is important to understand the financial market [1]. Facing the status quo of the co-exist of mass media and new media in such an internet age, to study the correlation between mass media and new media is of importance to figure out the role of media played in the process of the information transmission and will help us to furtherly understand the financial market.
A strand of literature has examined the role of the media in the financial market. But they are all concentrated on one specific media, either mass media or new media. However, the correlation between mass media and new media as well as the different roles they played in the finical market is not studied. How they co-exist and what impact on the process of information transmission that they have in the financial market are not clear, especially considering the reprints. In this paper, we examine the correlation between mass-media news and new-media news considering the reprints simultaneously.
We find that mass media and new media exhibit a symbiotic relationship in the stock market, where mass media devotes to provide original news with high quality and new media transfers these numbers of news to more readers to attract more attention and discussion. And we also find that mass-media news and new-media news maintain a positive correlation over time and the correlation becomes stronger when the stock market performs well. These results will help us to comprehend the role of the information intermediary of media. Therefore, we add to the literature on the role of the media in the financial market. On the other hand, there are some studies about the correlation between mass media and new media. But fewer of them are about the financial market and take reprint into account. Hence, we also add to the literature on the correlation between mass media and new media for the financial market.
The closest research is our previous work, which we used the sample data of stocks of CSI 300 and SSE index, respectively, to explore the correlation between mass-media news and new-media news. Comparing their work, the contributions of this paper are 3-fold. Firstly, we consider the reprint when we studying the correlation between mass-media news and new-media news. Secondly, we improve the classification criteria for mass-media news and new-media news and provide a more objective and reasonable classification criterion. Thirdly, The larger samples, the stocks of the full Chinese stock market, and the new methodology used in this paper could provide more comprehensive and effective results.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section Literature review gives the literature review of the role of the media in the financial market and the correlation between mass media and new media. Section Data and sample describes the sample data using in this paper and its’ statistical properties. Section Result and discussions reports the empirical results and section conclusions provides the conclusions.
