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

Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries 
70
 
different media outlets. Even when still producing local or localised content, these companies 
benefit from shared facilities such as sales departments, printing facilities or consumer 
research as well as from outsourcing parts of their production chain to cheap labour countries 
within or outside the EU (for instance, some Dutch and Flemish newspapers are printed in 
Poland). For these multinational companies the notion of a European single market might be 
relevant. 
The effects of digitization and the internet on the size, growth, structure and international 
competitiveness of the EU news publishing industries are still uncertain. On the one hand 
there is a decline in print news readership and a move to online news consumption, which – 
even though newspaper publishers do also publish online versions of their newspapers – are 
often detrimental for the news publishers’ revenues. On the other hand the internet has also 
lowered entry barriers for newcomers and made cross-border distribution and consumption of 
news easier. This has led for instance to new players like Google and Yahoo entering the 
market, which have taken over part of the aggregation functions that newspaper publishers 
used to provide. As the major online news aggregators are US based, this could strengthen the 
grip of US companies on the European news market. At the same time, lower costs for news 
production and distribution might have also strengthened some EU newspaper publishing 
companies, especially those with ‘cross-border’ potential. However, there are currently few 
publicly available statistics which show the countries where newspaper sites visitors come 
from, and thus no solid evidence for online crossborder potential of European online news 
services run by newspaper publishers.
All in all the effects of digitization and the internet on the cross-border trade within the EU27 
and from the EU27 to other countries outside the EU27, the extent to which this could enlarge 
the single market and whether or not it improves the competitiveness of the EU news 
publishing sector vis-à-vis the US or Asia are still largely unknown. Due to a lack of 
consistent and comparable data they are also difficult to determine. This report attempts to 
make a start with analysing some of these developments, based on the very scarce available 
evidence. 
In this chapter we first provide an indication of the relative health of the European newspaper 
publishing sector (paragraph 0), by comparing turn-over (paragraph 0), circulation (paragraph 
0) and employment (paragraph 0) figures with those for the US, China, India and Japan. We 
also provide some figures on the online performance of newspaper publishers in these 
countries (paragraph 0). In paragraph 0 we will try of find some evidence for the extent to 
which newspaper publishers are operating in a single European market or whether they are 
mainly catering for national markets. We will do this firstly by looking at the level of intra-
EU imports and exports, based on Eurostat data. These data indicate the exports and imports 
of EU Member States to and from other EU Member States.
Often the extent to which the EU27 can function as a single market is seen as a precondition 
to increasing the competitiveness of the EU vis-à-vis the US and Asian markets. By lowering 
obstacles for cross-border trade EU companies can benefit from economies of scale and 
thereby grow faster and become more competitive vis-à-vis the US and upcoming Asian 
markets. Secondly we will look at the external competitiveness of the EU27, where the EU27 
is compared to its major competitors, the US and Japan, China and India. Due to the lack of 
comparable, longitudinal data, we can only provide some indications. Section 0 presents the 
conclusions of this chapter. 

---