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

Figure 13: Total average circulation free dailies 92,005 - 2009 
Source: TNO based on WAN-IFRA data, 2010. 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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2.4.3 
Digital online and mobile technologies 
In the following paragraph some of the activities of newspaper publishers in the digital 
domain will be discussed, in some cases also comparing the activities of newspaper publishers 
with those of other and ‘internet-only’ news providers.
Online news providers (traditional news) 
Around 1980, the internet offered a new strategic challenge to newspaper publishers and a 
new platform for news publishing. From 1980 on, newspapers (of which the New York Times 
and the Wall Street Journal were the first) offered their news online (at first in online 
databases, later on newspaper websites and news portals). According to Boczkowski (2005), 
around 1995 newspapers relied on the internet as their preferred non-print publishing 
environment; in 1998 more than 750 American newspapers offered their news on websites 
(Boczkowski, 2005) and in 2000 this number was up to 1207 (WAN IFRA, 2011); a 37% 
growth. Between 2003 and 2007, the number of online newspaper websites grew 51%. From 
2006 to 2007 this growth percentage was almost 14% (WAN IFRA, 2008). Online, 
newspapers reprinted original content from the paper, increased their usefulness by adding 
related (multimedia) content and published new content as well (for example continuing 
updates of news stories). At the same time, these developments also enabled other news 
producers (like broadcasters and ICT companies) to extend their production online, 
diversifying the competitive field in the news sector. Broadcasting corporations, ICT 
companies and internet-only news providers now increasingly compete with newspaper 
publishers for online advertisers and audiences.
Newspaper publishers have experimented with different ways of expanding their news service 
to the online domain. The Guardian (UK) for instance is known for its innovative use of 
online possibilities. On the website of the Guardian, users can read (newspaper) articles, but 
they can also access additional content such as blogs. In addition, The Guardian offers 
extensive opportunities for interaction; users can create and save clippings for later use or 
send content to others. The Guardian offers its users insight into the trending topics by 
displaying Zeitgeist, a new way to reveal and disclose news based on 'social signs' of 
Guardian users.
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Zeitgeist displays a dynamic visual record of what people find interesting on 
the website of the Guardian. Another success story is Der Spiegel. This leading German 
newspaper has an independent web edition with 60 journalists working for it and 5.6 million 
unique visitors per month, who have little overlap with the print readership. The Der Spiegel 
website is said to have been profitable since 2005 (Esser & Brüggemann, 2010). One of the 
best known French online news services is Rue89, founded by former editors from the French 
newspaper Libération in 2007. 
Newspaper publishers have not only used the internet as a new platform for publishing news, 
but have also used internet tools such as email and RSS to alert people to news. RSS feeds 
make the websites of newspapers accessible by crawlers to aggregate content automatically. 
By providing RSS feeds to their websites, news publishers enable users to automatically keep 
up-to-date with new articles on their website. Thus, a reader does not have to visit the news 
website to check whether a story has been updated or a new article has been published. This 
has, on the one hand, facilitated the news consumption process. But on the other hand, by 
offering RSS feeds, newspaper publishers have paved the way for aggregation websites like 
Google News and applications like Flipboard, Pulse, Zite and Instapaper to aggregate and 
display content, and thereby distracting readers from their own websites (Filloux, 2011).
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/zeitgeist

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