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

3.2.2 
Aggregation and distribution 
Newspaper publishers are not only the producers of news but also the aggregators of news. 
They combine news from different sources and in different categories in one print product 
under a single brand name. In the digital domain the production and aggregation of news are 
no longer necessarily in the hand of one player. Online companies like Yahoo, Google and 
MSN have grown into important news aggregators. These companies aggregate news from 
external sources and distribute the news through their (news) portal sites. They use software 
to browse the internet and gather news from existing news sources. They gather the news on 
their own portal, provide the first few lines of the news message and a link to the full article 
on the source’s website. This practice has led to on-going disagreements between legacy news 
publishers and online news aggregators. Newspaper publishers accuse Google of stealing their 
content and making money out of it, by placing advertisement on Google’s own aggregation 
website and by deep-linking to articles instead of guiding visitors trough the newspapers’ 
online front page. These practises cause major losses in online revenues for newspaper 
publishers. Google offers the opportunity for newspapers to remove links to their websites 
from Google News, but this is for most newspaper publishers not an attractive option, as they 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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also benefit from Google News because it generates traffic to their website. At the same time 
news consumers benefit from the options to personalise news and (pre)select preferred news 
sources and themes that Google News and other online news aggregators offer. The debate 
about the use of newspaper publishers’ content by Google News illustrates the tension 
between the news incumbents on one side and the new online intermediaries on the other side.
Similar issues arise between traditional publishers and the providers of applications like 
Flipboard, Pulse and Zite. These are apps which offer an attractive magazine- or dashboard-
like user interface and aggregate news and information from a personalized selection of online 
sources, combining this with social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and options to 
publish, share and recommend the content. Some of these have content deals with publishers. 
They differ in the kind of content offered, business models and the ways in which they 
prioritize news selections (.e.g. based on curation by editors, personal search histories or on 
recommendations in the users’ social network).
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Publishers accuse these services of 
generating income on the back of the traditional news providers. This is one of the reasons 
why many of the new news services do not yet charge their readers for their service. Like 
many internet start-ups they attempt to gain a large user base first, in order to become 
attractive for advertisers and/or explore other business opportunities in a later phase, once 
they have proven to be popular. 
Comparing traditional and ‘new’, online news providers there are distinct ways in which they 
perform their roles in the news production and aggregation process. Most traditional news 
providers function as gatekeepers and have an active role in selecting, producing and editing 
news, whereas many new news providers function primarily as gate watchers and gate 
openers by observing, commenting on and linking to news and information, which is made 
available through off- and online sources by traditional news media but also by press releases 
and reports from government, industry, NGOs etc. (Bruns, 2003). News providers who do not 
have their roots in traditional media, use their websites to offer platforms to users to add 
information themselves, or directly link to content from other news providers. They often play 
an intermediary role, or function as moderators or facilitators of discussions. New entrants 
often produce less content themselves; they are less likely to employ a large editorial staff and 
are more dependent on other news sources.