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

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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The newspaper publishing crisis has been felt harder in some countries than in others. From 
the largest European newspaper publishing countries, the newspaper publishing industry in 
Germany seems to be doing better than it is, for instance, in France and the UK. The French 
press has been hit harder and is less able to respond to the challenges of new technologies and 
increasing competition due to its outdated and monopolistic production and distribution 
systems. In contrast, the German press is doing comparatively well, and Germany is home to 
a number of well-established global publishing companies. As a whole, the European press is 
doing better than US newspaper publishers. One explanation for this is that European 
newspapers are on average less dependent on advertising revenues (on average for 50%). 
They generate a larger share of their revenues from sales and have a relatively large number 
of subscribers, whereas the US press relies on advertising for approximately 85% of its 
revenues. 
Technological innovations have accompanied newspapers’ history, from the invention of the 
printing press to the internet. Newspapers benefitted from improvements in printing 
processes, photography, communication technologies, word processing, publishing software 
and electronic management systems. At the same time, the introduction of new technologies 
also brought new competitors, first radio news, later TV news programmes and currently 
internet news providers, of which the latter seem to have had the most fundamental 
consequences so far for newspaper publishers. Over the last two decades, newspaper 
publishers have responded to the changing market environment in a variety of ways: for 
instance, by: 
 Introducing new sections and (weekend) magazines which offer readers light 
entertainment and lifestyle information and offer advertisers extra, attractive advertising 
space.
 Changing the newspaper format: from broadsheet to Berliner, or tabloid format. 
 Introducing free news papers. 
 Launching websites and other online services such as email newsletters, RSS feeds, news 
apps, etc.
 Exploiting their brand name by offering extra products such as books, DVDs, wine or 
travels, related to for instance their book, film or lifestyle newspaper sections.
 In general: integrating their journalistic profile more strongly to their commercial 
potential. 
Newspapers have become major internet players. These days most newspapers have websites 
and offer a number of additional services to their readers. On the internet, newspaper 
publishers have to compete with broadcasters, citizen journalists and online-only news 
providers and have lost some of their readers and advertising revenues to these ‘new’ online 
news providers.
There are many online-only news services which mainly publish news reports from news 
agencies and do not provide any original news content. Often this is complemented by user-
generated content. Users take on increasingly active roles by producing or disseminating news 
through blogs and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. User roles vary from simply 
sharing news with friends through social networks to providing comments on news stories, 
contributing to stories from professional journalists and uploading pictures, to investigating 
and producing full news stories on blogs or sites for citizen journalism. In some cases, they 
share in the revenues, when their content is sold to other news providers or when their stories 
generate a lot of page views and thus advertising revenues.

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