Free to succeed: Does press freedom influence the entrepreneurial orientation and the reader revenue performance of independent news media firms?—A cross-sectional study

The notion of Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is operationalized here to explore the influence of press freedom (PF) on the performance of news media firms. We find that growth in reader revenues (RR)—digital and print—is statistically significantly correlated to both EO and PF, suggesting that subscriptions to independently produced news are likely to be better in countries with high degrees of PF, and in instances where the firm’s leaders are entrepreneurial.