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

The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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support stories by filling (commercial) questionnaires. Spot.Us partners with other news sites 
and newspapers and sometimes manages to sell the stories produced through its site There are 
also individual free-lance journalists who try to realize their publications with the support of 
‘crowd funding’, for instance the Dutch journalists who follow the build up to the Olympic 
Winter Games in 2014 and how this affects the remote Russian Sochi village, where the 
games will take place (Leurdijk, 2010).
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At the same time the Spot.US model has only been 
copied as a new funding model by very few news providers (A. Ibargüen, 2011). So far these 
alternative models seem to be more successful in the US than in European countries, possibly 
due to larger home markets and a longer tradition of private sponsorship than in Europe. 
3.4 Conclusions 
Internet and digitization have caused major changes across the value chain. New digital 
technologies support different phases in the production of news, enabling better access to 
worldwide online information and news sources, faster communication and easier processing 
and integration of text, (moving) images and sound. Users have become active participators in 
the value chain by sharing, commenting upon and contributing to news production in various 
ways. Many new online business models rely at least partly on users, who offer their 
contributions for free or at least for much less than professional content. Although traditional 
newspapers also experiment with user contributions, their professional staff remains a core 
asset – even though many have had to cut down their editorial staff. Consequently labour 
costs for professional staff remain substantial. Moreover legacy newspaper publishers have to 
bear the double costs of producing the print newspaper, while simultaneously investing in 
their online presence. Online they need to compete with new news providers, which do not 
have to bear the investments in printing presses, and often manage to be more efficient in their 
spending on offices and staff. Online-only news providers sometimes provide original content 
and news, but often function in the first place as news aggregators, by linking to other news 
sources, like Google News, or by providing apps with attractive, user friendly interfaces 
combining content, social networks and options to add and share content. Many online news 
providers also rely to a considerable extent on voluntary contributions of citizens. 
Most legacy news papers so far have been unable to compensate the loss in print revenues by 
the growing online revenues. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly online news 
mainly relies on advertising but some main advertising categories, which used to be strong in 
newspapers, such as job and real estate advertisements and personals, have no moved to 
specialized stand alone advertising sites. Secondly revenues from online advertising are much 
lower than for print advertising. Online advertisements are thought to have less impact, due to 
fragmented audiences in some cases their reach is lower, but most importantly, there is less 
scarcity in advertising space and thus prices are much lower. Thirdly, the willingness to pay 
for online news has so far been low, with a few exceptions for specialized news categories, 
such as financial news, and a number of high quality, international/US newspapers. Recently, 
hopes are set on raising advertising revenues by improving targeted advertising based on 
consumer and consumption data, on the introduction of paywalls on tablets and smart phones 
and on personalized news aggregation services, which combine news from different sources, 
social networks and web 2.0 tools. It is still too early though, to determine the level of success 
of these strategies. 
A major question regarding the future of news production is how advertising and other 
revenues will be distributed between old and new news aggregators and to what extent these 
revenues will be re-invested in original news production. When advertising revenues mainly 
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