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

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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checking, explaining and interpreting news and information. In this context there is also 
debate on whether some forms of journalism are at risk and might therefore require a certain 
level of state support.
Nielsen and Levy (2010) signal two simultaneous developments in how news publishers try to 
face the digital challenges. The first is one in which news publishers offer more exclusivity by 
introducing premium services and pay walls for exclusive or high value content. The recent 
take-off of mobile platforms and tablet computers and the gradual penetration of e-books 
provides publishers with more options to charge for a (personalized or premium) news offer 
and consumers seem to display more willingness to pay for news apps and e-papers than for 
online news services. The second development is one in which news publishers try to 
integrate professional journalism and user generated content by making the news more 
relevant for users and inviting them to contribute to news production and distribution. The 
internet offers many new opportunities for journalists and news publishers to strengthen the 
relation between their product and its users, especially by making the relationship more 
mutual and by exploiting all options for interactivity and user participation. According to 
Nielsen en Levy finding the right balance between exclusivity and participation is the main 
challenge for the news publishing sector. They see this challenge not just as an economic, but 
also as a social or democratic challenge. A business model that would rely too much on 
exclusivity by providing niche content to affluent elites may be commercially successful but 
ultimately fail to fulfil journalism's democratic functions and would therefore not be the best 
solution for the news publishing business as a whole.
What kept the print model in place, is that it bundled different content categories and 
advertising, or as Shirkey puts it: “Newspapers, [as] a sheaf of unrelated content glued 
together with ads [….]” (Shirkey, 2011). One could argue that the popular newspaper 
categories, such as sport, entertainment, lifestyle, cartoons and the weekly cross word puzzle 
paid for the less popular but, at least from a social and democratic point of view, important 
news categories, such as foreign policies, financial and economic news and investigative 
journalism. Because now large parts of advertising have moved to the web, and news is also 
available in unbundled forms, the traditional print model has been severely undermined.
Online, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens. The high margins 
which newspapers earned on print advertising can not be maintained online. While some news 
categories might still be sustained by advertising or consumer payments, others are unlikely to 
be able to survive without alternative funding models. Table 18 summarizes the opportunities 
and threats facing the EU newspaper publishing sector in the digital media environment. 

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