Saturday, June 19, 2010

OECD - a study into the future of newspapers and the Internet

[oecd] A study providing an in-depth treatment of the global newspaper publishing market and its evolution, with a particular view on the development of online news and related challenges.

It assesses online news consumption patterns and new online news value networks, compared with the traditional newspaper value chain. It shows that the economics of news production and distribution has been radically altered, in particular in the context of the economic crisis which has accelerated structural changes. After very profitable years, newspaper publishers in most OECD countries face declining advertising revenues and signficant reductions in titles and circulation. The economic crisis has amplified this downward development. However, the data and the large country-by-country differences, for currently do not lend themselves to make the case for “the death of the newspaper”, in particular if non-OECD countries and potential positive effects of the economic recovery are taken into account.

Importantly, the study shows that many promising forms of news creation and distribution are being experimented with, some of which are empowered by increasing technological sophistication and resulting decentralised forms of content creation and broad-based participation. The rise of the Internet and other technologies radically changes how news is produced and diffused. It enables the entry of new intermediaries that create and distribute news, including online news aggregators, online news publishers, mobile news actors, citizen journalism and many more. Information providers with very different trajectories (TV, newspapers and Internet companies) are now competing head-on in a global online news environment. More recently newspaper websites have seen strong growth in their own pages, with large newspapers reporting several million unique visitors to their pages per month, increasingly including readers from abroad, a radical shift from national patterns of established newspapers.

The evolution of news and the Internet

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