  Social and biological collectives need to exchange information to persist and
to function. This happens across internal networks, whose structure represents
static channels through which information flows. Less studied is the quantity
and variety of information transmitted. We characterize a part of the
information flow, the information going into organizations, primarily business
firms. We measure what firms read using a data set of hundreds of millions of
records of news articles accessed by employees across millions of firms. We
measure and relate quantitatively three essential aspects: reading volume,
reading variety, and firm size. First we compare volume with firm size, showing
that firms grow sublinearly with the volume of their reading. The scaling means
that inequality in information volume exaggerates the classic Zipf's law
inequality in firm size, pointing to an economy of scale in information
consumption. Then, by connecting variety and volume, we show that the firms
vary in their reading habits to a limited degree. Firms above a certain size
become repetitive readers, consistent with the sudden onset of a coordination
cost between teams, not individual employees. Finally, we relate information
variety to size to show that large firms tend to increase investments in
existing areas of interest instead of divesting from them to move to new areas.
We argue that this reflects structural constraints in growth. The results
indicate how information consumption reflects the role of internal structure,
beyond individual employees, analogous to information processing in other
social and biological systems.
