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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Table 18: Opportunities and threats for EU newspaper publishing sector 
Value 
network 
Opportunities 
Threats 
Production 
 
Benefits of scale through mergers and 
acquisitions, shared facilities 
 
Lower entry barriers 
 
Cross-platform production 
 
Potential cross border reach, esp. for sites in 
languages spoken by many across the world 
Users contribute to content production 
 
Increasing competition from broadcast and 
online news providers 
 
Less investment in original news production 
 
Loss of content diversity (some news genres 
at risk)
Aggregation 
and 
distribution 
 
Mobile platforms taking off 
 
News Apps and e-papers 
Cross platform marketing 
 
Loss of control over value chain 
Consumption 
 
More tools to connect to and engage with readers 
 
More tools to track consumers’ news preferences 
 
Largest online players from outside 
newspaper sector are in best position to 
offer new communication and social 
networking tools 
Business 
models 
 
New pay models (paywalls, donations, crowd 
funding) 
 
New targeted advertising options
 
Platform and hardware producers take 
substantial shares of readers and revenues, 
mostly US based companies 
From another angle, one could argue that it is not so much the printed newspapers which need 
to be saved, and not even the companies producing newspapers, but the democratic functions 
which newspapers are claimed to fulfil. To asses the extent to which these functions are at 
risk, a more integrated analysis is required, which takes into account the revenues, value 
added, but also the investments, quantity as well as quality and reach of all news services 
produced by newspaper publishers, broadcasters, internet only news providers, user generated 
news sites, news aggregators and other news publishers, on- and offline. 
Eurostat data only provide figures on the traditional newspaper publishing companies, and 
only to the extent that this is the core business of a company. They therefore do not provide 
sufficient insight into the fundamental transformations taking place in the newspaper 
publishing sector, as many newspaper publishers are now part of larger multimedia 
companies, whose main activity may be in broadcasting, book publishing or other activities. 
Eurostat data also do not provide a sufficient basis to analyse developments in the wider news 
publishing domain, of which broadcast and online news are also important parts and in which 
many news companies from outside the traditional news publishing and even outside of the 
media and content industries are active. In this report we therefore included data from 
industry reports and consultancies, which provide figures on developments in circulation and 
revenues and on the shift from print to online revenues for newspaper publishing companies. 
These data provide better insight into what is happening on the level of the products and 
services at stake, rather than the developments at company level. But most industry and 
consultancy reports do not provide sufficiently systematic and consistent data on these 
developments either, as their data collection is usually based on traditional sector delineations. 
Though they provide better insight into the online activities within the traditional newspaper 
publishing and broadcast sectors than the Eurostat data, they do not single out the news 
provision services within the much wider market of news providers. More importantly, they 
also do not systematically collect data on e.g. number of firms, employment, value added, 
revenues and investments of online news services provided by companies outside the media 
and content industries. Therefore it is hard to asses how much online-only news providers, 
news aggregators like Google, Yahoo, citizen journalism sites or user-generated news sites 

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