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

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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Table 17: Strengths and weaknesses of EU newspaper publishing sector 
Value network 
Strengths 
Weaknesses 
Production 
 
Large number of companies, titles, 
circulation 
 
Strong online presence 
 
Different levels of public support 
 
Weak innovation potential
Aggregation & distribution 
 
Newspapers can benefit online from 
strong brands 
 
Fragmented market 
 
Lack of cross-border trade 
Consumption
 
Large newspaper reach in some 
countries and strong brand loyalty 
 
Declining readership and reach in 
most countries, especially among 
young generations 
Business models 
 
European newspapers still have 
relatively large share of income 
from sales, rely on advertising and 
stock markets than US newspapers 
 
Declining circulation, readership, 
advertising revenues 
 
Online revenues do not compensate 
losses in print advertising and sales 
 
6.2 
Opportunities and threats 
The fundamental changes brought about by digitization and the internet have confronted 
legacy newspaper publishers with great challenges, but also offer them new opportunities for 
innovation and growth. Online news distribution provides increased opportunities for 
reaching readers outside the newspaper’s traditional geographical boundaries or for reaching 
new groups of readers, such as younger people. The websites of large newspapers are often in 
the top ten of most visited news websites in a country. Newspaper publishers can benefit from 
cross promotion between on- and offline products, and they can make their print product more 
attractive by offering online extras. They could also benefit from sharing editorial staff and 
other resources amongst their different on- and offline products, though this is known to be 
not an easy endeavour due to very different culture and work routines between print and 
online journalists. 
But in this wider market newspapers are also confronted with more competition from 
companies outside the traditional newspaper publishing business, for instance from 
broadcasters’ online news services, from national or local online only news providers, from 
(international) internet and software companies which offer news services such as AOL, 
MSN, Google, Facebook and Yahoo and from platforms for user generated news. This 
increased offer and choice of information and news is in many ways beneficial for consumers, 
offering them increased volume and choice of news, ways to customize, share, comment upon 
and contribute to news. But all these changes do not necessarily benefit the legacy news 
publishing sector.
The newspapers which are likely to benefit most from online opportunities are those with 
strong brands, with affluent, (international) audiences and publishers who can spread their 
costs over different media products and services. Economies of scale and scope seem to have 
become more important to maintain a viable business. This is also true online, where the 
largest newspapers are often among the most successful online news sites, though they are 
often beaten by the large online news aggregators in number of visitors. In this domain the 
large US based ICT companies often are most successful. The recent take over of the 
Huffington Post by AOL also shows how for local news, bloggers and news aggregation sites, 
scale and scope matter. It enables them to produce and distribute news in the most efficient 
way to consumers, to benefit from shared content production and shared advertising sales 
efforts for their news services. Online there might also be opportunities for special interests 
news services aimed at niche audiences, which can be reached more efficiently online than 

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