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The impact of a mixture of positive and negative media coverage on long-run hotel survival remains unknown. This paper aims to investigate how the mixed positive and negative media coverage, namely, inconsistent media coverage, influences long-run hotel survival.

A yearly panel data set covering 792 news-reported hotels in Guangdong province of China, over the period 2010–2020, is analyzed using an inconsistency analysis framework consisting of text mining and survival analysis. The estimates of exponential models on the same observations and Cox estimates on alternative observations are used for robustness checks.

The inconsistency calculation method proposed here can measure the controversy degree well. There exists a U-shaped relationship between inconsistency of media coverage and hotel longevity, and hotel survival is significantly reduced only when the degree of inconsistency is within the range of 17.8%–53.6%. The U-shaped relationship is moderated by negative hotel image and by online media coverage on hotel operation strategy topics.

This study provides suggestions for hotel managers to use media coverage inconsistency to increase long-run hotel survival in the digital era.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to investigate long-run hotel survival factors from the perspective of media coverage inconsistency. It also proposes a method to calculate the degree of media coverage controversy, which helps to quantify the relationship between the degree of inconsistency and hotel survival.

Few studies on hospitality firm survival consider the impact of online media exposure. This paper aims to investigate how the online news coverage of restaurants, characterized in terms of the number of articles, channel (Web page or mobile app), topic (operations or products) and consistency (mix of news tones), influences their survival.

A yearly panel data set covering 682 news-reported restaurants in Shanghai, China, over the period 2011–2019 is analyzed using a Cox model, and an extended cross-sectional data set containing 9,488 restaurants is used for robustness checks.

A larger number of online news articles, regardless of channel or topic, significantly improves restaurants’ chances of survival, and this positive impact of online exposure is greater if that news is published by mobile apps (rather than on Web pages) or reports topics related to operations (rather than products). Although, generally, news inconsistency is not good for restaurant survival, when the number of online news items is eight or more, inconsistency becomes good for survival.

This research guides restaurant operators to use news exposure in an online marketing environment to increase the firm’s chances of long-term survival.

Online media exposure has hitherto been ignored in the literature on the survival of hospitality firms. This paper provides a new perspective on hospitality firm survival and also contributes to the literature on media exposure by conceptualizing a unique factor, namely, the consistent online exposure.