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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 Industrial structural change, including analyses of concentration and consolidation, 
integration, diversification and new entries; 
 The competitive position of European industry players in a European and global context; 
 The effects of digitization in different parts of the value network (production, 
delivery/distribution, consumption of content), new business models, new positions in the 
value chain, and the role of users; 
 The role of policy; i.e. not a full analysis of policy impact on the subsectors, but the main 
policy issues and trends as important contextual factors. 
This report is based on a review and synthesis of the available literature and reports and 
(official and unofficial) data on the newspaper publishing industry. The study starts with a 
compact sketch of key statistical data on the developments in number of firms, number of 
employees and value added between 1995 and 2007, based on Eurostat data (also published in 
the Statistical Report of the MCI study, TNO, 2011).
The newspaper publishing industry is the market segment that falls under ‘publishing of 
newspapers, journals and periodicals’ in the Eurostat databases (category 2212 in Eurostat, 
ISIC rev 3.1).The category includes:
 Daily/non daily/Sunday newspapers, 
 National/regional/local newspapers, 
 Paid-for/free newspapers. 
These figures illustrate developments in the traditional news publishing industries, but they 
reveal only part of the story. The reason that the Eurostat statistics provide a limited picture is 
that Eurostat categorises media companies by their core activities. This means that newspaper 
publishing activities that take place in companies, which do not have newspaper publishing as 
their core business, are not visible in the statistics. For instance, the newspaper publishing 
activities of a multimedia company which has TV production as its core activity will not be 
counted under newspaper publishing. Similarly, online news services run by ICT companies 
such as Google do not appear in the Eurostat statistics on the news publishing sector, as these 
will be listed elsewhere, under ICT or software publishing. These omissions could lead to an 
underestimation of the size of the news publishing industry. On the other hand, the Eurostat 
statistics could also lead to an overestimation of the size of the sector, as the non newspaper 
publishing activities of companies which have news publishing as their core activity are also 
included in the figures. It is therefore hard to asses to what extent the Eurostat data provide an 
accurate picture of what is going on in the newspaper publishing industry. 
Online news services produced by newspaper publishers are included in the official Eurostat 
statistics, but are not separately identifiable. Therefore the Eurostat statistics do not allow us 
to determine for instance which share of the employees or revenues comes from online news 
publishing and which share from print news publishing.
A final shortcoming is that Eurostat data are always some years behind, so they will not yet 
reveal the extent of the changes currently taking place in the news publishing sector.
To complement Eurostat data and compensate for some of these omissions we used the most 
recent data from the international trade organisation, the World Association of Newspapers 
and News publishers (WAN-IFRA, 2010) and consultancy reports such as the Media & 
Entertainment Outlook by PwC (2011). These sources include several indicators for size and 
growth such as circulation, sales, and advertising revenues. However they provide little 
information on the underlying dynamics. Therefore academic publications and reports from 

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