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 
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through physical distribution of print newspapers, though there are not many data available to 
support this assessment. 
An important threat for legacy news providers is the insecurity they face, caused by the fact 
that they no longer control the aggregation and distribution of their news. News is 
increasingly circulated through news aggregators and social networks and these companies 
benefit from advertising revenues that come with the traffic generated through aggregating 
and sharing news content. This development affects news publishers worldwide. It leads to a 
redistribution of costs and revenues of which news aggregators and owners of social 
networks, mostly owned by US companies, benefit most. In general these companies do not 
invest in original news production. The overall decline in revenues for new publishers is 
therefore a serious threat to investments in original news production. 
On the whole the problem does not seem to be that there is less interest in news, but that the 
advertising revenues are diverted and that the willingness to pay for news has diminished. 
This affects the legacy news providers, but also most local and national online-only news 
providers have difficulties in finding viable business models. There is such an abundance of 
news and information available for free on the internet that it takes much more effort to 
produce an offer, which users are prepared to pay for. Also – for the legacy newspaper 
publishers - revenues from digital advertising are not likely to make up for the losses in print 
advertising. Even though income from digital advertising is rising, the prices for ads will 
remain much lower than newspapers publishers are used to receive for print advertising.
The effects of the changes in revenue streams are not the same across the board and should be 
qualified for different kind of journalism. Some forms of journalism might be harder to charge 
for than others. Examples of journalism which seem difficult to charge for are headline and 
general interest news, entertainment news and (some forms of) sports reporting. As these are 
also popular forms of news, they might be sustained by advertising revenue. Other forms of 
journalism, which require expert knowledge and investigation are scarcer and could still have 
added value for which people are willing to pay, especially if the information is indispensable 
for people’s job performance and of high value for businesses. Examples are financial and 
economic news, or background information on international politics. Some of these forms of 
journalism could even succeed in attracting paying users as well as advertising revenues, as its 
readers often fall in high income groups, are loyal readers who spend time on the news 
they’ve paid for an thus more likely to also see the advertisements and are well defined 
groups which are of interest for targeted advertising. There are, however, also forms of 
journalism which run the risk of falling into the gap between these two, for instance the kind 
of journalism that requires sustained following and investigation of institutions and 
companies. This kind of journalism, providing journalism’s watch dog function, is crucial for 
well functioning democracies. At the same time this form of journalism might have fewer, 
less affluent or less obvious ‘stakeholders’ taking care of or paying for its continuing 
existence. In this field the search for alternative funding mechanisms such as crowd-funding 
and sponsoring is most urgent. In the US there are some prominent investigative journalism 
sites. Most of which are sustained by private donors and sponsorship, such as ProPublica and 
SpotUS. In the EU donor and sponsorship models are less well developed. Crowd-funding 
can work for some imaginative projects or local projects, in which readers have a direct 
interest, but might be more difficult to organise structurally and might not be a sufficiently 
stable source of income to sustain more continuous journalistic reporting on less appealing 
issues, or on issues of which the results are hard to predict in advance.
Another concern is to what extent society wants to rely on the information published by 
companies and institutions, on bloggers opinions and on citizen journalists, or to put it 
differently, to what extent there is added value in the role of professional journalists selecting, 

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