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

Conclusions 
The newspaper publishing sector in Europe is in a transition phase. Its legacy business is 
declining, it is facing increased competition and its new online and mobile services have yet 
to grow into profitable businesses, in most cases. Newspaper publishers are trying out various 
new models, none of which has so far compensated the revenue losses of the print 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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newspapers. Meanwhile the legacy publishers have to bear the double costs of sustaining their 
offline print newspapers, and investing in new online news services. 
In order to adapt to these fundamental changes, newspaper publishers need new products, 
business models and organizational structures. They also need to invest in a different 
relationship with their readers. However legacy newspapers are often slow to respond to 
changes in the environment, especially while they can still make a profit on their print 
products, even though these profits are declining. Legacy newspaper publishers have some 
strengths which could help them to maintain a position as major news providers in a digital 
environment. They can exploit their brand, cross promote their on- and offline products as 
well as share editorial staff and other resources amongst their different on- and offline 
products. But the decline in print newspapers is not likely to stop soon, and not all newspapers 
will be able to achieve this position.
Newspapers have not only lost many of their readers, they have also lost many of their 
advertisers. These are the advertisers which can reach their audiences at lower cost and more 
effectively online through online market places, dating sites, coupons, direct marketing and 
other forms of online advertising. Strong competition for legacy news publishers also comes 
from online news providers, news aggregators and social networks, which draw readers as 
well as advertisers away from newspapers and newspaper websites. Most countries have one 
or more popular online-only news providers, but many of these employ only few professional 
journalists and editors. Their news offer often consists mainly of news agency reports, in 
combination with user-generated news, and different tools to share, discuss and organize 
one’s personal news offer, and much less original reporting than in the serious print 
newspapers. Online, aggregators and social network owners, mostly owned by US companies, 
seem to benefit most from growing numbers of internet users and advertising revenues. In 
general, these companies do not invest in original news production. The overall decline in 
revenues for news publishers is therefore a serious threat to investments in original news 
production, especially in more vulnerable news genres, such as investigative journalism and 
sustained reporting on local government. Citizen journalism, bloggers and user-generated 
news cannot always provide the desired levels of quality, continuity and reliability (which is 
not to say that professional journalism has always lived up to its own professional standards). 
The problem for news publishers seems not so much that there is less interest in news, but that 
there are less advertising revenues and less willingness to pay. At the same time, some 
specialist news providers do manage to sell their services, and recently a number of large 
news publishers (re)introduced pay-walls to parts of their online news content. News 
consumers also show some interest in paying for flexible, personalized online mobile news 
services which can be read on smartphones and tablets.
In order to fully assess the current transformations, data collection must become more 
comprehensive. It must also include data on news broadcasters and all major new online news 
providers, some of which come from outside the traditional media industries, instead of being 
restricted to the traditional industry delineations. Only then will we fully understand the 
competitiveness of European news providers and see whether journalism will be able to 
continue to fulfil its democratic functions. 

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