Private-Sector Media and Online News in Six Countries
2016 SISP Annual Conference
UniversitàStatale di Milano –15-17 September 2016
Panel section 5.2:
Journalism and its transformations: who, what, when, where and why?
Title of the abstract:
Private-sector media and online news in six countries:
a comparative study on approaches to digital platforms
Alessio Cornia
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – University of Oxford
Because of technological developments and changes in media use, legacy news organisations are facing important challenges today. Both newspapers and private-sector television news providers are adapting to a new situation characterised by an increasingly important role of mobile and social media platforms for news access, new competitors and critical threats to their traditional sources of revenue. In this paper we analyse how the main private-sector news organisations in six European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK) are responding to these challenges and the role of economic factors in explaining similarities and differences in approaches to digital platforms.
In each country we selected four legacy news organisations (one commercial TV broadcaster, two national newspapers and one regional newspaper) and conducted more than thirty-five face-to-facesemi-structured interviews with individuals who are responsible for both the editorial and the business sides of the news activities. In addition, desk-based secondary data collection was conducted to analyse the main trends affecting the newspaper and television sectors in the six countries and the online and offline performances of the selected news organisations.The aim of the study is to explain the main differences and similarities among countries, types of media and individual news organisations by analysing, in particular:
1)how media executives frame the main challenges and opportunities their organisations are facing today
2)how they are adapting their newsroom structure and developing strategies to deliver news on mobile and social media platforms
3)how they are testing new sources of digital revenue.
Results show how, firstly,the selected news organisations are facing similar challenges in term of adapting their newsroom structureto the most recent developments.Indeed, established organisational procedures for news production and distribution are being brought into question within all the news organisation selected for this study, and new positions and teams (e.g. social media teams) are introduced in many news organisations. In many cases, important newsroom changes were taking place in the very moment the data collection was taking place. The general solution most commonly adopted is the move from separated newsrooms for online and offline activities to more integrated newsrooms where all journalists produce news for bothtraditional and digital platforms; the newsaresubsequently adapted to television, desk, mobile and social media formats by desks that specialisein single platforms.
Secondly, the broadcasters and newspapers’approaches to digital are strongly affected bythe different economic situations of the traditional sectors where they operate. Newspapers, whose traditional business is more dramatically affected by shirking audiences and declining advertising revenues, show a higher propensity to invest in online news, to implement important changes in their news offer and in experimenting new sources of digital revenue (e.g.bystrengthening of teams working on native advertising and online video). The broadcasters’ approach to digital is instead characterised by incremental change, and digital platforms are perceived as a mean to wider their audience, ratherthan an opportunity to improve their business in the short-term period. As to off-site news distribution through social media, both broadcasters and newspapers are characterised by a cautious approach, but the press players tend to be more open in experimenting and in finding agreements with social media platforms.