The Authoritative, the Reacher, and the Shareable: Concentration and Dispersion in the Valuation of French News Media

Until the early 2000s, the value of a news outlet was assessed by two opposing criteria: reach, or its capacity to reach a broad audience; and authority, or its recognition within the journalistic profession. Social media platforms introduced a third criterion: shareability. Building on David Stark's valuation theory (Stark, 2009), this paper investigates how these three registers of worth are distributed across the French media ecosystem. Based on quantitative analyses of an original corpus of 312 French media outlets, we find that the media ecosystem is highly concentrated, with the most established outlets having the greatest reach, authority, and shareability. However, shareability contributed to the emergence of newer, anti-elite news outlets that have gained recognition on social media without building either reach or authority. Finally, shareability does not resolve the tension between reach and authority, which remains a structuring factor in the media ecosystem.