ABSTRACT Using data on press articles about Chinese public firms from 2004 to 2021, we examine how a firm's ownership structure affects its media coverage. We find that firms with multiple blockholders get significantly more media coverage than their single‐blockholder counterparts and that this attention nontrivially increases firm value. The effect on coverage strengthens with the perceived newsworthiness of the firm, as reflected by higher total ownership and more relative voting power of non‐controlling blockholders, and by more blockholder stock trading and changes of corporate control. The effect also increases as the power of the controlling shareholder decreases and as agency problems worsen since they both make the firm more newsworthy.
Jiang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.