Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Newspaper Publishing Industry

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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Furthermore, supported by free and easy accessible online content management tools like 
Wordpress, the amount of user-generated websites and weblogs has expanded drastically 
(Thurman, 2008). A weblog is a website with regular entries of commentary provided by an 
author, and to which users can respond with their own commentary (Pascu, Osimo, Ulbrich, 
Turlea, & Burgelman, 2007). Since 2003, the number of blogs rose exponentially; at the end 
of 2003, 2 million weblogs were tracked by Technorati. Two years later, 20 million blogs 
were tracked and in August 2008, Technorati indexed almost 113 million blogs. In 2009, 
Technorati decided to stop indexing blogs and sites in languages other than English, so recent 
figures on the total number of blogs are not available. At the end of 2011 Technorati indexed 
1,29 million English language (www.technorati.com). Blog content can be searched through 
blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster, Blogsearch (Google) and IceRocket.
Many weblogs are news related and some of them have grown into important players on the 
news market – for example the US Huffington Post, and the South Korean OhMyNews.
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OhMyNews (founded in 2000), for example, generates news written by a small staff and (for 
the largest part) by its users since 2000 (Yeon-Ho, 2007). In 2000 the citizen journalism 
website started with approximately 700 reporters and in 2007, this number rose to over 
500,000 reporters from 200 countries. Citizen journalists who publish on the website are paid 
approximately 50 Euros by the service if they produce a headline story. They can also receive 
tips from readers who appreciate their story (Yoo, 2007). In Europe, there are numerous 
citizen journalism websites, aimed at national as well as regional and local audiences. 
Examples are Agoravox,
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Baksheesh (founded 2006), Street 89 (founded 2007) and 
Mediapart (founded 2008) (France), Readers Edition
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(Germany), You Reporter
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(Italy), and 
Nyhetsverket
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(Sweden). The Dutch online only news provider NU.nl also combines headline 
news from professional news agencies with stories and picture uploaded by users (see the case 
study in Appendix B).
These forms of user generated news contribute to the amount of available online news outlets 
and sometime fill in gaps that have emerged in news reporting, due to the closure of print 
newspapers. In the US, in particular local and hyperlocal online news production (i.e. news on 
neighborhoods, blocks) is vibrant, aided by voluntary contributors. Some local or hyperlocal 
news sites even employ paid staff, but compared to the numbers of newspaper editors and 
journalists that have been laid off and the drop in editorial spending on newspapers, the 
increase in paid staff and earnings is minimal (Waldman, 2011). In the US AOL has hired 
local reporters/editors for its local news service Patch in about 800 communities and recently 
took over the Huffington Post, and the Examiner.com has set up local news sites in numerous 
places, but these news providers focus on entertainment, lifestyle and sports news and offer 
much less reporting on local public affairs. 
From a quality perspective there is criticism that these user generated news sites are 
sometimes at odds with professional journalistic practices. Some journalists and publishers 
fear that the growth of user generated news will go at the expense of traditional journalism, as 
it offers news publishers cheaper content than professional journalists can offer. They also 
argue that amateurs providing news often violate journalistic standards. They accuse bloggers 
of ‘stealing’ their news messages and of publishing them on their weblogs, without proper 
compensation and/or reference (Allan, 2005). User contributions are also assumed to be 
sometimes unreliable and the quality of most blogs is, according to some critics very low 
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The Huffington Post, was bought by AOL for $315 million in 2011.
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http://www.agoravox.fr/
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http://www.readers-edition.de/index.php
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http://www.youreporter.it/
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http://www.nyhetsverket.se/

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