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

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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market consultancies have also been consulted to enable a more in depth understanding of the 
main markets trends, especially of the fundamental impact of digitization and the internet on 
the business models in the news publishing market. A recent report published by the 
Columbian Journalism School (Grueskin, Seave, & Graves, 2011) presents useful data on 
business and revenue models of a number of the most important US news publishers. Similar 
overviews of business models employed by news publishing companies in the EU are not 
available. Here more anecdotal evidence from various academic articles and online business 
sites covering media markets is used. 
In assessing the EU’s competitiveness in Chapter 4, newspaper publishing in the EU will be 
compared to newspaper publishing in the US and Asia. However there is little coherent and 
comparable statistical information available about international developments in the news 
sector. For international comparisons mainly OECD and WAN data are used. In the yearly 
WAN and OECD reports, European countries as well as American and Asian countries are 
included. In the US, the developments in the news sector are well documented. Institutions 
like the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism keep track of and report 
extensively about developments in the US news market.
In order to illustrate the developments a database was compiled, containing some key data on 
10 major European and 10 non-European news publishing companies. In addition two 
company case studies are included. The first company case study on publisher Sanoma 
illustrates how a traditional newspaper publisher has responded to changes resulting from 
digitization and the internet and how the changes have affected its business and strategies. 
The second company case study deals with the Huffington Post as an example of a well 
known and successful example of online news publishing, which combines user generated 
news with professional news and news aggregated from other news sources.