Abstract
Newsonomics, the discipline founded by Ken Doctor, expert news media analyst, examines the trends characterizing the transformation of journalism in the digital age. In this chapter, we focus our attention on some of these tendencies in our critical analysis of the sustainability of the firms in this industry that have opted to innovate and invest in new interactive formats. We understand that a book of this kind, dedicated as it is, to interactive communication, must not lose sight of the fact that the news media form part of an industry and that this industry must be sustainable, regardless of the ownership model employed by each firm. In this chapter, we provide a general overview of the main dimensions of sustainably in the news media. To do so, we draw primarily on sector reports published by bodies of high repute and illustrate our discussion with some of the best known cases. One of the key ideas underpinning our analysis is that new interactive platforms—in any of the formats examined elsewhere in this volume—offer a whole range of new incentives for readers. These, in turn, are exploited—or at least should be—by news media firms to increase their readership, and to build subscriber loyalty in the case of firms opting for a paywall business model. Over the following pages we review the various dimensions that Newsonomics can take—with The New York Times serving as an obvious success story—via the adoption of different digital communication formats. We also look at the new experiences and the new business models that are currently being considered by members of the news media industry for future adoption.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Similar Web data, Bío-Bío Chile obtained an average traffic of 28 million monthly users between June and November 2017. Full details available at https://www.similarweb.com/website/biobiochile.cl.
- 2.
Ken Doctor continues to publish reports about the news media industry at his website http://newsonomics.com/ and to write opinion articles for Nieman Lab.
- 3.
The authors of this chapter have created an observatory of the uses of live video journalism on social platforms. It can be accessed at https://www.smls.info/.
- 4.
The English edition of BNamericas can be consulted at https://www.bnamericas.com/en/.
- 5.
Various Sustainable Journalism Prizes are awarded. Thompson Reuters Foundation and Barilla present the “Food Sustainability Media Award” for those who write about nutrition, the King of Spain Awards have a special section for “Environmental and Sustainable Development Journalism”, and various Latin American countries give Awards for Sustainable Journalism (PESU).
- 6.
On going to press, the percentage stake being put up for sale had not been confirmed.
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Apablaza-Campos, A., Codina, L., Pedraza-Jiménez, R. (2018). Newsonomics in the Interactive Era: Dimensions of Sustainability in the News Media. In: Pérez-Montoro, M. (eds) Interaction in Digital News Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96253-5_6
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