MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

Abstract

The future of journalism is increasingly digital, mobile, and in flux. It is unexplored territory.

Like the explorers and navigators of the Renaissance, various organizations – governments,

NGOs, journalism groups, and universities, among others – have been trying to map the most

promising routes through the new media ecosystem that will lead to sustainable publications that

provide news and information crucial to a democratic society. As traditional news media

organizations have lost revenues, laid off employees, and reduced coverage, new digital media

have emerged as important players in providing public-service journalism, especially on the local

level. Researchers from a variety of organizations have created databases of thousands of new

digital media to study best practices and find new models for sustainability. This paper focuses

on research conducted mainly in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Although the

countries studied have varied cultural, linguistic, legal, business, and political environments,

many of the findings were similar: The vast majority of the new digital media were fragile and

barely surviving. The recommendations were also similar: These fledgling publishers needed

training in management, marketing, sales, and technology, and they needed more diverse funding

sources, better audience measurement, and more collaboration with public and private

institutions. These road maps would be crucial to helping new digital media restore the declining

commitment to accountability journalism so important to a democracy.

Keywords: digital media, entrepreneurial journalism, business models, media economics

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

I. Introduction

Human beings have been making maps of the skies, land, and seas for thousands of years

(Whitehouse, 2000). The nautical maps of the Renaissance helped explorers find opportunities

for trade and avoid danger. Much of the world was unknown territory for those explorers. And,

of course, some of the maps were based on speculation and educated guesses that turned out to

be wrong.

In the world of media today, researchers are creating, metaphorically speaking, new maps

and for the same reasons: To show where the opportunities lie and where the dangers lurk. The

difference is that the unknown territory is the future of journalism in the digital media ecosystem.

Communications scholars and journalism organizations around the world have launched a

variety of projects aimed at listing, categorizing, and analyzing the new digital news

organizations. As will be shown, research goals have ranged from identifying and sharing best

practices, to creating a network for advertising, to marshaling a lobby that might influence

lawmakers and regulators in their various countries (Breiner, 2014). This paper is going to focus

on the studies that have attempted to create maps for the future of journalism that show the most

promising paths to sustainability and impact.

The story of how traditional media organizations have lost advertisers and audience to digital

media disruption in the past decade is well known. When that decline was combined with the

global economic slowdown that began in 2007, media organizations suffered mightily (in a

crisis, many firms cut their advertising and marketing budgets first). One data point: between

2006 and 2014, U.S. newspapers saw advertising revenue decline 60 percent, or $30 billion (Pew

Research, 2015). Most media organizations responded to the twin crises by cutting costs to

preserve profit margins, and that meant severe cuts in payroll and significant cuts in coverage of

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government and public institutions. In the U.S., 18,000 newsroom jobs have been lost since 2006

(Pew Research, 2015). In Spain, to pick the most extreme example from Europe, 11,100

journalists have lost their jobs since the twin crises began (PR Noticias, 2014).

The reduced quality of public-service journalism occurred just at the moment when the

public was discovering ways to be more involved in their governance and give more feedback to

the powers-that-be about what they deemed important. In many newsrooms of traditional media,

however, reporters continued to cover politics from the perspective of the insiders. They wrote

for a small but influential audience that paid more attention to lobbyists and campaign

contributors than the mass of citizens who paid taxes. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens were taking

to blogs and social media to talk about issues that mattered to them – education, health care,

income inequality, public transportation, the environment, gender issues, racism, and more.

Advertisers followed the audience to the Internet, but they did not always buy space and time

from traditional media. They put their ad budgets into platforms like Google, Facebook, Yahoo,

and Twitter, which used tracking technology to deliver targeted ads to specific consumer profiles

in a way that promised to reduce the waste of using traditional mass media (eMarketer, 2014).

Traditional media could not respond to that challenge effectively; they had not invested in

technology and chose instead to cut expenses and preserve margins.

Some less obvious trends were also taking place in the background – the migration of news

consumers to mobile devices and the growing importance of social media in distribution of news.

Two events accelerated those trends. The debut of the iPhone in 2007 and Facebook’s decision in

2011 to focus its investments and development on mobile were a double blow to traditional

media. The marriage of a popular new device to an application for the world’s most popular

social network transformed a migration into a stampede toward mobile and social networks.

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Graphic: Google and Facebook’s combined share of digital revenue grew

from 33 percent to 38 percent. Source: Pew Research.

Mobile media consumption has overtaken all other media formats, according to the World Press

Trends 2015 report. Consumers around the world were spending 2.2 hours a day with mobile

devices, or 37 percent of media time – more than television (81 minutes), desktop (70 minutes),

radio (44 minutes), or print (33 minutes), (WAN-IFRA, 2015).

The stampede took yet more advertising away from traditional media and strengthened a new

media monopoly, one of digital advertising dominated by technology platforms – mainly Google

and Facebook but also players like Yahoo, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others. Between

them, Google and Facebook controlled 39 percent of all digital advertising revenue globally and

72 percent of all mobile ad revenue (eMarketer, 2014).

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In the good old days before the Internet, only millionaires or big companies could afford to

launch a new publication or broadcasting outlet, and the business model was fairly simple. The

publisher or broadcaster had a near monopoly of distribution in a given media market, which

made the time and space they offered to advertisers a scarce commodity. So publishers and

broadcasters had tremendous pricing power. But the party was over for traditional media, and

one of the main casualties in all the cost-cutting, particularly at print media, was the kind of

watchdog journalism that provided a counterweight to political and economic power. At the

same time, many countries now had thousands of laid-off journalists, and many decided to

launch new digital media, often with the goal of filling the gaps in the lost coverage. For

newcomers to the news business, the barriers to entry in the digital world were low. They did not

need millions of dollars to buy a printing press or a broadcasting license. Anyone could use free

or cheap tools to launch a website or open a channel on YouTube.

But the barriers to sustainable independent digital media were high. What most of the

newcomers lacked was the knowledge, experience, and skills in the business and technology

sides of journalism. They needed a road map, if you will, to show them how to transform a

volunteer community-service project or niche publishing hobby into a productive journalism

organization. Through thousands of small-scale experiments, these new digital media are blazing

a trail for the future of journalism. They are taking risks that most major media will not or cannot

take. The studies of new digital media that we will consider here are trying in various ways to

identify successful strategies and tactics that any digital entrepreneur can use to map a road to

sustainability. These studies vary widely in their methodology, rigor, and usefulness.

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II. Mapping the digital ecosystem around the world

One of the best studies of the elements of long-term sustainability for journalism startups

looked at 69 pure-player digital publications in nine countries. Three universities – the

University of Tampere in Finland, University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for

Communication and Journalism, and Waseda University Graduate School of Journalism in Japan

– collaborated on the project, called “Chasing Sustainability on the Net” (Cook & Sirkkunen,

2012). The study included a database that was still available online in 2015.

The researchers selected for-profit media that were at or near profitability at the time of their

study. They noted that “there has been little research or academic focus to date on the business

models for for-profit journalism startups” (p. 8). And while they recognized that aspiring

entrepreneurs could emulate the tactics of the models in their study, they also pointed out that the

differences among countries in their legal systems, media subsidies, culture, language,

commercial practices, and history of media made some tactics and strategies non-transferrable

across borders.

In interviews conducted by the researchers, many of the entrepreneurs repeatedly made the

same recommendations on the keys to achieving sustainability. They were:

Keep the team small to control costs

Master many skills, including business management and technology

Diversify revenue sources

Teach advertisers the value of digital vs. print campaigns

Sell donors and members on a relationship with the mission of the publication

Find a niche and relentlessly differentiate yourself

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This study reviewed more than a dozen revenue sources used by the media organizations,

including 16 different advertising models. The most common revenue sources used by the 69

publications in the study were advertising, selling content, selling data and technology, events,

freelancing, and consulting (p. 119). As for the type and quality of content produced, the

researchers observed:

The database and analysis confirm that startups are carving out – and playing – an increasing

role in the service of journalism as reportage. What role they have in the accountability of

journalism and civic society, however, remains unclear...This study proposes that a dynamic

number of sites are being created: there is a rich and growing number of digital journalism

offerings springing up in the space every day. As such, startups are likely to play an

increasingly influential role in the accountability of journalism. (pp. 122-23).

France, Italy, Germany

About the same time as that study was published, the Reuters Institute for the Study of

Journalism at Oxford University published a study of nine “strategically chosen” journalism

startups in France, Italy, and Germany (Bruno & Nielsen 2012). The study’s title – Survival is

Success – said everything about the precarious nature of digital startups. The authors chose to

focus on Europe rather than the U.S. because “it is dangerous to assume that experiences coming

out of a U.S. media market” would be of much use anywhere else in the world, given the

enormous size of the U.S. population and “massive advertising spend (twice as high as many

European countries as a percentage of GDP” (p. 7).

The researchers delved deeply into the legal, political, and cultural differences among the

countries and observed that the dominance of legacy media, which benefited in varying degrees

from public subsidies, made it difficult for startups to attract audiences and advertisers. Most of

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the nine were operating at a loss. The most successful financially was Mediapart in France, an

investigative news site operating behind a paywall (p. 11).

Among the study’s observations and conclusions:

There was no single formula that worked for all the startups (p. 13).

Diverse revenue sources were needed. Advertising alone could not support a

meaningful digital news operation in Western Europe (p. 67).

European startups had a limited potential audience because of language, unlike

English language sites that could attract a global audience (p. 9).

The most successful of the nine start-ups in the study identified niches poorly served

by the incumbent industry. They focused on unique content and developed unique

strategies around that content. They operated with lean organizations (p. 8).

Interestingly, all of those elements were also part of the success formula mapped out in the

study by Cook and Sirkkunen.

Journalism organizations in France and Italy have also created databases of digital startups

with some of the same motivations – solidarity, self-help, and lobbying. In 2011, the website

Journalismeinfo.fr published a list of 53 pure-player digital sites of local news in France (Robin

& Berthier, 2011). The authors described a sector that was populated by very small media, a few

with full-time salaried employees but most with volunteer staff who had an interest in their

communities. Since then the sector has organized itself. A group called the Syndicate of the

Independent Online Press (Syndicat de la Presse Indépendante d’Information en Ligne) has

published an online list of 148 members (96 in Paris) that were publishing 175 titles (Spiil,

2015). The organization has published a guide of best practices on its website as well as

sponsoring how-to seminars and training events.

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Italy’s National Association of the Online Press (Associazione Nazionale Stampa Online)

was formed to represent online publishers “of a local character”, a total of 80 publishers of 150

titles with a monthly audience of 15 million monthly readers. Its membership benefits included

training meetings, legal assistance, and an advertising network. Its membership list was not

available online.

Spain

The financial crisis hit Spain harder than most of the other European countries. Its

unemployment has exceeded 20 percent since 2010. One of the leading organizations

representing journalists in Spain, the Press Association of Madrid (Asociación de la Prensa de

Madrid), reported that 11,100 journalists had lost their jobs and 100 media outlets had closed

since the financial crisis began in 2007 (PR Noticias, 2014).

One consequence of all those layoffs has been that many of those journalists decided to start

their own digital media. The Press Association of Madrid compiled a list of 406 sites launched

by journalists since 2008 and still active as of 2014. According to a survey, completed by 120 of

the publications, the content focus of the largest percentage was local news (27 percent),

followed by art and culture (10 percent), sports (10 percent), and the rest spread over 14 other

subjects (Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid, 2014, p. 79).

In an interview, one of these entrepreneurs, Manuel Benito Ingelmo, described how he

launched a new type of news agency, Porcentual, based on creating data visualizations

customized for local news outlets from government databases on unemployment, GDP, and

election results (Breiner, 2015). Ingelmo said he was earning enough from subscriptions from 80

clients to pay himself a salary and pay programmers to provide the product for his clients, mainly

media and business organizations. Ingelmo’s revenues, which he gave in general terms, would

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have placed him among the top 17 percent of the startups surveyed, with revenues from $55,000

to $110,000. Of the remaining respondents, 70 percent earned less than $55,000, and 13 percent

earned more than $110,000 (p. 81).

The study concluded that “many of these startups need people with responsibility for finding

revenues” and that most of these media organizations need “big doses of training” in areas

besides journalism, in particular technology. The journalists were poorly equipped, for the most

part, to be successful long-term (p. 83).

Not included in the study, because it launched pre-crisis, was the largest and perhaps most

successful digital startup in Spain, El Confidencial, which had revenues of $9.9 million, profit of

$1.1 million, a staff of 100, and 14 years of history as an independent news site of investigative

journalism (Cobo, 2015). It has funded itself almost exclusively by advertising. Researcher

Silvia Cobo attributed its success to a commitment to independent, investigative journalism and

the organization’s investment in innovation in every aspect of the publication.

Another significant digital startup not included in the study launched in October 2015. El

Español was the project of controversial editor Pedro J. Ramirez, which began with cash

investment of $20 million, including $5.5 million from Ramirez himself, and $4 million from

5,600 shareholders who invested between $110 and $11,000 each (The Local, 2015). The

headline of The Local’s article announcing the debut captured the essence of public interest in

the new publication: “Rebel editor launches crowdfunded digital newspaper”.

The publication had a newsroom of 70 journalists plus another 30 employees on the business

side at launch. Ramirez had a reputation for doing investigative journalism that uncovered

corruption at the highest levels of government and business. The launch was highly anticipated

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because the publication started out as a blog several months before, with daily scoops promoted

in social media channels.

Latin America

The most systematic mapping of media in Latin America has been a project of Poderopedia,

an organization that has created software to visually map networks of relationships among the

powerful – their families, universities, employers, contributors, friends, business associates, etc.

The focus of one of its studies, reported on by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas,

was which people and businesses controlled the major media in Chile and Colombia (Mioli,

2015). The study was significant because Chile and Colombia ranked second (67 percent) and

third (62 percent) respectively in terms of internet penetration in Latin America, after Argentina

(75 percent), according to Internet World Stats in October 2015.

The study included information on each of 829 media in a publicly viewable online database,

including 216 digital sites in Chile (Poderopedia, 2015a) and 44 in Colombia (Poderopedia,

2015b). The study found a high concentration of media ownership among a handful of large

media groups in Chile; the researchers were far less successful at identifying private ownership

in Colombia. The databases had no information about revenues or business models of the

websites, and spotty information on traffic and audience size. However, the databases

represented a significant contribution to media research in that they were crowdsourced and built

incrementally by cross-referencing data from the media themselves, regulatory agencies,

academic studies, news reports, and interviews. New information could be proposed by users,

and the code used to create it was open-source.

A separate study of digital media in Colombia by the journalism organization Consejo de

Redacción and the Centro Ático of the Universidad Javeriana looked at 650 digital startups (Rey

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& Novoa, 2012). Of those 650, 55 percent were journalistic in nature, and 60 percent carried

advertising (p. 8). The researchers also sent a survey to all of the 650 organizations and received

61 responses (9 percent). Of the respondents, 23 financed themselves primarily with advertising,

18 with private capital, and 6 with donations. Seventeen carried no advertising (p. 26). The

researchers clearly were not as interested in financial sustainability as they were in how the

various cities and provinces of Colombia were being served by digital media, and the survey

questions reflected that.

A leading source of information about digital media entrepreneurs in the region has been the

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas, which conducts an

annual International Symposium on Online Journalism. At its 2013 edition, it hosted a

colloquium on sustainability in which 23 of the most prominent digital news organizations from

Latin America participated. El País of Spain covered the event and summarized some of the

trends. A major theme: the precarious situation of these digital media. They were often

dependent on foundation grants and lacked the marketing and sales skills to build an audience

and attract advertisers and sponsors (Quesada, 2013).

Relator Anne Nelson’s report on the colloquium emphasized that the successful business

models of digital media in the U.S. did not translate to Latin America, which had less of a culture

of private foundations and private equity investment (Nelson 2013). A common theme of many

presenters was that digital media needed to develop multiple revenue sources beyond advertising

to survive. The report included a summary of the reports of 14 digital startups, including two

from Spain and two from Brazil.

Meanwhile a U.S. based digital media consultant, Janine Warner, who is bilingual in English

and Spanish, has been developing a database of Spanish language digital media, declaring on her

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website, “SembraMedia.org is dedicated to helping entrepreneurial journalists and

digital startups that produce informative content online in Spanish. We are creating a directory

and online community to help digital entrepreneurs connect with each other, share best practices,

and support each other’s work.” The building process was getting started in 2015 with the aid of

some foundation support and researchers based in a dozen different Latin American countries.

They are identifying and profiling media that display best practices.

Africa, Asia, and the developing world

The two biggest players in financing independent media in the developing world are not focused

exclusively on digital, as this paper is, but should be mentioned – the U.S.-based Media

Development Investment Fund (MDIF) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF). Over a 20-

year period, MDIF has provided $134 million in financing to 108 clients in 38 countries,

including Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. OSF, the project of billionaire

George Soros, invested $44 million in 2014 in media programs around the world. The problems

of media generally in the developing world are similar in many ways to those of digital media

startups everywhere – lack of access to capital and training. According to a 2011 report by the

World Association of Newspapers and the Swedish International Development Cooperation

Agency, “Independent news businesses across the developing world face a shortage of

investment capital to develop their outlets into sustainable democratic institutions,” “The demand

for capital with no editorial conditions attached far outstrips supply...Without capital,

[publishers] are forced to survive on limited personal, family, or grant finance or forced to

compromise their editorial independence in order to gain access to the investment they need to

compete with subsidized state media” (p. 8).

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English language startups

English language websites need to be considered separately from their counterparts in the

rest of the world for several reasons. English is by far the most important language for publishing

news on the web. In Alexa’s rankings of the world’s top 50 news websites based on traffic, 47

were in English (Alexa, 2015).

In another Alexa study, this one of the top 10 million websites ranked by traffic, English was

used by 55 percent of the websites, Russian by 5.9 percent, German by 5.7 percent, Japanese by

5.0 percent, and Spanish by 4.7 percent. Chinese ranked eighth at 2.3 percent (W3Techs, 2015).

Another reason for the importance of English, at least in the short term, is that the U.K. and

U.S. have some of the leading innovators in digital media. Great Britain is home to three

international leaders – The Daily Mail, the BBC and The Guardian -- as hundreds of hyperlocal

news organizations. The U.S. has a culture of entrepreneurship, stimulated by the model of

Silicon Valley, with plenty of venture capital, well funded journalism schools, a connected

society, and abundant foundation money supporting journalism.

The foundation money has been a particular stimulus to digital media startups in the U.S.,

and it marks a significant difference in the way digital journalism startups have been funded.

Many have opted for a nonprofit model. From 2005 to 2012, J-Lab tracked $249 million in

grants awarded by 279 foundations to 308 nonprofit news organizations (J-Lab, 2013). The

searchable database listed these grants by the foundation, news project, and location. Although

there were some major grants, the median amount of more than 1,000 individual grants made

over this period was relatively small -- $70,000 – so that the benefits were sprinkled about. The

largest donor was the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which made 106 grants totaling

$55 million, but the next largest was one grant by one foundation to one media organization --

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$30 million from the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation to the investigative journalism

website ProPublica. Rounding out the top five were the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism

Foundation at $13.5 million, the Ford Foundation at $11.2 million, and the McCormick

Foundation at $7.6 million.

Digital sustainability in the U.K.

Digital news startups in the U.K. and Ireland were tracked for a number of years by a website

called Local Web List. The Carnegie U.K. Trust originally funded the database. In 2015, it

included more than 570 hyperlocal news sites. This online database has been limited in scope to

identifying basic information about the location and geographic area covered by the websites.

However, researchers from Cardiff, Westminster, and Birmingham City universities used it as a

basis to conduct a more detailed survey. They wanted to find out two things: How sustainable

and successful were these websites and did they play a role in the democracy (Williams, Barnett,

Harte, & Townend, 2014).

Three-quarters of the 183 respondents in the study had been producing news for three years

or more, which indicated that the sector was fairly well established. However, the sites were

mostly quite small and not well known. “Most hyperlocal news sites suffer from a lack of

visibility in their own communities, with only very few reaching a high percentage of their

potential local audiences” (p. 4). Only two of the respondents in the sample had more than

100,000 unique users, 33 had 10,000 to 100,000 and the remainder had below 10,000 (p. 21).

Part of the reason for their small size seemed to be ignorance, willful or otherwise. One-fourth of

the respondents, the study found, did not know, did not wish to know, or did not know how to

find out what their page impressions and user numbers were (p. 20). They did use social media to

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promote their work – 91 percent on Twitter and 80 percent on Facebook – but evidently not to

great effect.

On the staffing and financing side, scale was also quite small. Only one-fourth of the

publishers reported that more than 40 man-hours per week were dedicated to their sites (p. 27).

As for revenues, 63 percent of respondents said they paid all the costs associated with running

the website by themselves, 9 percent generated revenue from the site but not enough to cover

costs, and 28 percent were breaking even or making some money (p. 28). As for financing

operations, 77 percent who responded sold advertising, 44 percent used their own money, 31

percent published sponsored features, 25 percent secured grants, and 25 percent donations.

Subscriptions were used by only 7 percent (p. 29).

In an average month, only 8 percent generated more than $3,100, and more than half reported

generating only $386 per month (p. 30). Yet against all that, they seemed committed and

optimistic -- 89 percent said they felt they could sustain the current level of work output or

increase it (p. 31). As in other countries, the vast majority of publishers were small, poorly

funded, short on trained personnel, and absolutely dedicated to the work they were doing.

Digital sustainability in the U.S.

In an important study on the other side of the Atlantic, the Pew Research Center in 2013

published an in-depth look at 172 nonprofit local news outlets. Again, the key word is nonprofit,

and it refers to the tax status and financial structure. All had been founded in the previous 25

years. In fact, 71 percent had been founded since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008.

The study included sites ranging from the nationally known to the hyperlocal but did not name

the news outlets chosen (Pew, 2013).

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Researchers started with a base of 1,849 websites and narrowed it down by requiring that the

final selections be domestic, active, primarily digital, and producing original content

(Methodology p. 26). They sent a detailed questionnaire to all 172 selected and received 93

responses. The respondents had many of the same problems as digital media startups in other

parts of the world, despite having access to a larger media market, more private capital, and more

foundation money. Slightly more than half identified business, marketing, and fundraising as the

areas of greatest staffing need, compared with 39 percent who said the top need was for more

editorial employees. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the nonprofits cited “finding the time to

focus on the business side of the operation” as a major challenge – compared with 55 percent

who cited “increasing competition for grant money” (p. 1).

As in the U.K. and elsewhere, staff size was small: ‘’About three-quarters of the 93

responding organizations had no more than five paid, full-time staffers for everything from

editorial to administration to business duties, and one-quarter had none at all. Only 8 percent of

the sites had more than 10 paid, full-time employees and just 6 percent (six in all) had more than

25” (p. 8).

On the low end, about one-fifth said they generated $50,000 or less in annual revenue in

2011 (see chart above), while on the high end, 15 percent generated more than $1 million in

annual revenues (p. 22). “But about half of those [93] organizations are still generating at least

75 percent of their income from a single revenue stream, almost always foundation grants” (p. 2).

The 50 independent nonprofits in the survey– meaning that they were not part of some other

larger organization – tended to be stronger in general interest news and investigative reporting.

Fifteen specialized in it, four covered government, and two the environment. Like the local news

publishers in the U.K., this group was optimistic. Eighty-five percent said they were on stable

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financial footing; 26 percent said they were “very confident” and 55 percent “somewhat

confident” that they would be financially solvent in five years (p. 24).

Graphic: Nonprofit news sites had relatively small budgets. Source: Pew Research.

One of the few databases of local news sites that was still being updated in 2015 was

Michele’s List, produced by digital media researcher and consultant Michele McLellan. To be

included in her list, a news website had to be “progressing on three fronts – content,

management, and revenue.” The database included 275 listings and had a filter function with 19

categories, including type of news, revenue sources, institutional partners, and location. Only 13

percent of the publications listed their tax status as nonprofit, 48 percent were for-profit and the

rest did not report that information.

With the support of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism,

McLellan did a report on 94 of the 275 sites in her database (McLellan, 2015a). Eighty

publishers representing the 94 sites responded to the survey. Among the key findings:

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Two-thirds generate $100,000 a year or less in annual revenue and slightly more than

half make $50,000 or less. Nine percent make more than $500,000.

47 percent said they turned a profit in 2014, and another 22 percent said they had

developed a steady flow of revenue but were not profitable.

Few reported much diversity of revenue sources. They were highly dependent on

local advertising that they sold directly, as opposed to using advertising networks.

Other revenue sources included membership, sponsorship, foundation grants,

donations, and events.

Only 17 percent relied exclusively on journalists as their primary source of content.

The rest had other contributors, including community members, students, and partner

organizations. Just over a third, 37 percent, had full-time paid staff as content

contributors. Most relied on freelance or part-time staff.

On the business/marketing/sales side, 46 percent had full-time paid staff. Only a third

of the publishers drew a full-time salary from their site; 40 percent of them were not

drawing any salary and 24 percent drew only a partial salary.

Most of the sites had limited reach. Two-thirds had fewer than 50,000 unique visitors

each month. Only two sites reported more than 500,000 uniques.

80 percent said they produce some investigative reporting, but for most it was

occasional or infrequent. Ten percent said it was their primary focus.

In addition to this study, McLellan investigated the sales practices of 22 of the sites, which were

selected for the variety of their sizes and missions. The result was a guide of best practices

(McLellan, 2015b). Of the organizations in the study, 10 focused on a niche topic or

demographic, while the other 12 focused on local news.

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McLellan found that, unlike digital media that aim to sell advertising based on audiences in

the tens or hundreds of millions, these digital operations “do not use a rate model based on cost

per impression (CPM), pay per click, or deals (such as Groupon) that require a large audience to

make any money. Instead, these organizations use direct sales to advertisers and offer exposure

to smaller, highly engaged audiences. This enables them to command higher rates, as they are

unlikely to be sustainable at the lower rates.” McLellan also found that these publications were

not diversifying their revenue streams. On average, ad sales accounted for nearly 80 percent of

their 2014 revenue.

There have been a number of other online databases of digital startups created, none as

thoroughly researched or updated as the Pew and McLellan studies. The Columbia Journalism

Review's Guide to Online News Startups included some 260 websites in the U.S. with self-

reported information on business models, staff, traffic, and content, among other information.

The database also had a national map showing locations of the media. The criteria for inclusion

were based on McLellan’s, but this database, still online in 2015, did not appear to have been

updated since 2013.

Between 2005 and 2010, J-Lab's Knight Community News Network created a list of 1,266

citizen journalism and community news sites located in the U.S., with a few in Canada (J-Lab,

2010a). The information was submitted by the users and then edited and approved. Although

there was a comprehensive questionnaire about staffing, content, budget,

and revenue sources, responses were spotty. In addition to compiling this list of

websites, J-Lab, with funding from the Knight Foundation, also helped launch 55 local news

sites between 2005 and 2010 with its New Voices program, which provided grants between

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$17,000 and $25,000. The database, still online in 2015, gave a brief profile of each of the

websites (J-Lab 2010b).

III. Road map to sustainability

An important goal of most of these databases was the sharing of successful strategies among

digital media startups in the skill sets not traditionally developed by journalists, such as

technology, administration, marketing, and financing. The assumption was that the journalists

who started their own media already knew about journalism. However, the fact is that many

digital media organizations are being run by people with no journalism training, which opens up

a huge opportunity for training in those skills. In addition, the professional journalists who have

launched web publications often have been too wedded to traditional models of one-way

communication in their traditional medium – print, TV, or radio – and have not taken advantage

of the strengths of digital media, namely interactivity with the audience, multimedia storytelling,

nonlinear presentation of information, databases, interactive maps and graphics, and alternative

distribution channels, among others. This section will look at some of the studies under way to

spread best practices and map promising pathways to sustainable public-service journalism.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2015 report included survey data of

consumers of media in 11 developed countries, including Japan and Australia (Newman, Levy,

& Nielsen, 2015). This study did not focus on startups or limit itself to digital media. However,

its findings and recommendations took into account the rising importance of digital media,

particularly mobile-based, in the mix of media around the world. Researcher Nic Newman, in his

executive summary, noted that sales of printed newspapers and print advertising had continued

their steady downward trend while the pace of migration of news consumers to mobile and social

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

platforms had accelerated (p. 7). Disruption by digital-born players – measured by the percentage

of respondents who had accessed digital news in the previous week – was lowest in Finland,

Denmark, the U.K., Germany, and France (ranging from 24 percent to 35 percent), where legacy

media tended to dominate the marketplace; meanwhile it was more significant in Spain, Italy,

Ireland, and the U.S. (46 percent to 52 percent), and highest in Urban Brazil, Japan, and

Australia (64 percent to 67 percent), (p. 17).

Local news was clearly an opportunity signaled in the study, in which the respondents saying

that “local news about my town or city” was “important” totaled 52 percent in the U.S., followed

by the U.K., Germany, Italy, Finland, Ireland, Brazil, and Austria, all with 40 percent to 44

percent (p. 61).

In the near term, news organizations were faced with significant challenges, researcher

Robert G. Picard concluded in the Reuters report. “The overall picture is one of low growth in

paid content consumption and a digital advertising market that is not highly favourable for news

providers” (p. 91). However, he saw potential sustainable business models through

“sophisticated service strategies with multiple revenue streams.” Among the examples he

mentioned were O Globo in Brazil and the Globe and Mail in Canada, both of which have been

mining user data across multiple platforms to develop products for which users would be willing

to pay (p. 92).

Another Reuters Institute study pointed out the challenge to media organizations of the

continuing trend toward automation of the buying and selling of digital advertising:

In the online environment, most trading and pricing is done automatically. A complex

network sits between the publisher and advertisers, much of it working in real time –

targeting adverts to maximise yield. In this ecosystem, the data captured by content providers

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

plays only a very small role. It is not used for trading, pricing, or audit – these are handled by

the specialist intermediaries in the online world. (Ofcom, 2014, p. 34).

In other words, the media organizations themselves had no role in pricing. In addition, the types

of advertising served to their users would be decided by algorithms that might deliver ads that

were annoying, invasive, and even offensive.

Other organizations have also tried to provide a road map to sustainability for journalism in

the digital age. The Dutch organization Shaerpa, which supports venture philanthropy and social

investment, studied how to finance quality journalism and laid out 52 ways for publishers to

generate revenue (Oostlander, P., Gauter, T., & Van Dyck, S., 2015). “We concluded with

confidence that quality journalism is a self-supporting proposition in this new ecosystem, and

even a quite profitable one” (p. 11). The authors admitted, however, that the fact that publishers

needed to create hybrid business models to generate revenue meant the process was much more

complex than in the past. “Self-employed information workers and small collectives do not have

the skills, culture or supporting infrastructure to market and sell their work” (pp. 14-15).

Without question the leader in funding studies and projects aimed at improving community

engagement and sustainability in digital journalism in the U.S. has been the Knight Foundation.

In a series of three reports, it tracked a small group of nonprofit news ventures over five years.

The second of these reports, called “Finding a Foothold” (2013), tracked 18 organizations chosen

for their variety in size, mission, and location. The aim was to tease out successful tactics and

strategies.

Among the key findings were that the organizations focused too much of their budget and

manpower on the news operation and not enough on the technology, marketing, and sales (p. 5).

The coverage focus of the 18 organizations broke down into local news (8), state government

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

and politics (7), and three national investigative (p. 6). Most did not have a good enough

understanding of their users to connect that information with revenue opportunities. Most had not

made social media a key part of their marketing strategy. Still, the combined revenue of the 18

grew by nearly 30 percent in three years and two-thirds reported a surplus in 2012.

Graphic: Only two of the 18 local news organizations generated most of their revenue from

earned income. The rest were heavily dependent on foundations and donations. Source: Knight

Foundation.

Key recommendations were for nonprofit media organizations to provide services such as

events and partnerships rather than just publishing news; to develop marketing, business, and

fundraising capacity; to strive for diversity in funding; and to substitute standard web metrics

with more meaningful measures such a repeat engagement and narratives about impact (p. 52).

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Knight published a followup study, this time with 20 organizations, most of them the same as

in the previous study (Knight Foundation, 2015). Average revenue growth in the two years

between the studies was 73 percent for all 20 sites. However, five either had no growth or a

decline in revenue (p. 8). The publications remained heavily reliant on foundations, which

provided 58 percent of total funding, but this was down by 5 percentage points from two years

earlier (p. 9). The sites generated only 23 percent of their revenue from earned income

(advertising, events, sponsorships, trainings and subscriptions), but that was up from 18 percent

two years earlier (pg. 4). Budgets ranged from $34,000 for the Rapidian in Michigan to $7

million for the Texas Tribune.

Entrepreneurial models: Texas Tribune, Malaysiakini

Finally, the Knight Foundation sponsored a followup study that went deeper into the revenue

model of “the most aggressively entrepreneurial” of those 20 sites, the Texas Tribune (Batsell,

2015, p. 3). The most important parts of the business model of the Texas Tribune were found to

be “revenue diversity, entrepreneurial creativity, and a shared sense of editorial and business

mission” (p. 3).

Batsell walked readers step by step through the evolution of the Tribune (pp. 4-10). The idea

for it sprang from research by software investor John Thornton. Thornton had a theory that he

could make money by buying undervalued newspaper properties at their beaten-down prices and

selling them later at a profit. Instead, what he found in his research disturbed him and aroused a

sense of civic responsibility. He concluded that public service journalism “could not survive as a

stand-alone product” (p. 7). In 2009 he put up $1 million to support a nonpartisan news source

that would promote “civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government and

other matters of wide concern”. He hired Evan Smith, editor of Texas Monthly magazine, to lead

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the operation as CEO and editor-in-chief. The organization raised $4 million by the end of 2009

from wealthy donors, foundations, 1,400 “members” who gave $50 each, and 60 corporate

sponsors at $2,500 each. The following year, Thornton gave a second $1 million with the

stipulation that it be matched by other donations. The Tribune grew from 17 employees in 2009

to 50 in 2015. It boasted of “more fulltime statehouse beat reporters than any other news

organization in the United States” (p. 7).

In its second year of operation, the Tribune found it was not raising revenue fast enough to be

weaned off foundation grants, so it hired Texas Monthly’s publisher, April Hinkle, to take over

revenue generation. That same year the Tribune hired an events planning expert from the New

Yorker. At the end of 2010 they were still two-thirds dependent on philanthropy. However, event

revenue rose to $700,000 in 2011, $900,000 in 2012, and more than $1 million a year later. By

the end of its fourth year, 2013, the Tribune was generating 45 percent of its revenue from

sponsorship and events, 34 percent from philanthropic sources, 13 percent from membership,

and 8 percent from syndication, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and other sources (pp. 7-10).

So how much of this could be replicated elsewhere? Batsell asked. Well, not every

publication would have an angel donor like Thornton or an entrepreneurial dynamo like Smith

(pp. 14-15). However, the Tribune and other successful nonprofit publications had some things

in common, among them diversified revenue sources, entrepreneurial creativity, and local

sensibility for how to price and position opportunities for sponsors. The Tribune, for example,

offered a sponsorship of the “most-read articles” box for $2,500 a month. The MinnPost in

Minneapolis-St. Paul sponsored MinnRoast, a musical send-up of local politicians. VTDigger’s

summer sponsorship drive drew big crowds and revenues in Vermont. Voice of San Diego

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

offered businesses and nonprofits a form of native advertising to tell their story in fuller ways

(pp. 15-17).

Some concluding recommendations to aspiring digital entrepreneurs from Batsell’s study

were:

Know your audience’s characteristics and sell that value, not just eyeballs

Sell memberships rather than subscriptions and define the pitch by asking for support

of independent public-service journalism (the Tribune had 2,700 members paying

$670,000 in 2013).

Monetize data sets (the Tribune generated $17,000 in just one month from Google

microsurveys by asking its members to fill them out each time they sought

information on government employee salaries and prison inmates) (pp. 20-28).

Another entrepreneurial star in digital media that deserves to be mentioned is Malaysiakini,

based in Malaysia, which was profiled for the Center for International Media assistance

(Carrington, 2015). Since its founding in 1999 by two dedicated, innovative journalists, Steven

Gan and Premesh Chandran, it has survived many ups and downs financially, battled government

attempts to censor content, and in 2014 was reaching an audience of more than 9 million visitors

a month (p. 7). Annual revenues have reached nearly $1.5 million, enough to employ 40

reporters (p. 8). It also received early stage financial and training assistance from the Media

Development Investment Fund, Open Society Foundations, and National Endowment for

Democracy (p. 5).

A unique feature of its business model was that it published in four languages – Tamil,

Chinese, Malay, and English – but only the English version was behind a paywall because that

audience was the one most able and willing to pay. Subscriptions have reached more than 16,000

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

at about $40 each annually (p. 8). The organization has also expanded into video products and

business news. Like the founding team at Texas Tribune, Gan and Chandran innovated

constantly and sought new opportunities to grow their audience and financial support.

IV. Conclusions

This paper has focused on digital media entrepreneurs because of the important role that they

are assuming in modern societies. As major brands in the traditional media of the developed

world have suffered from digital disruption and the global economic crisis, they have cut back on

coverage of local news and institutions. Accountability journalism has suffered. As a result,

communities have not been well served. At the same time, in the less developed world, the new

digital media have often been the only independent voice that was not controlled by political or

corporate interests. As such, these independent voices often have faced censorship hard and soft,

and the soft version has often taken the form of barriers to financial sources and distribution

channels. Without finding new formulas for supporting this type of accountability journalism, an

important pillar of modern governance in an increasingly digital world – a vigorous independent

press – will be in danger. Yet this new army of digital journalists and communicators, which is

supposed to be creating the future of news and public-service information, often has lacked the

training and the tools to do the job.

So here are some of the challenges, as shown repeatedly by the various studies mentioned in

this paper: To find new formulas of financing that include a mix of public, philanthropic,

corporate, government, and institutional sources; to develop training of high quality and low cost

to serve as many of these entrepreneurs as possible; to create more effective delivery and

distribution channels for this training; to develop more international reporting efforts to minimize

the power of dictators and repressive governments in any one country to control the flow of

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information; to create more digital communities of journalists in countries or regions with shared

language and culture that can act in solidarity as a counterweight to the corporate and political

power.

As we have seen, many of the challenges described above have been taken on already in

various parts of the world. In addition, the studies here have shown the way many organizations

are mapping the road to success in independent digital media. These are some of the signs and

warnings on the map:

Enthusiasm is not enough. Digital publications that do not develop a sound financial

base and rely too much on volunteer work will have trouble producing the quality

coverage that builds a loyal audience.

Diversify revenue sources – some advertising (preferably sponsorship, which is not

tied to CPMs, clicks, etc. but to a sponsor’s identification with the mission and values

of the publication); some membership or donor contributions; some philanthropy;

events; direct sales of products; consulting; training; crowdfunding of projects, and

more.

Recruit a team with a diversified skill set that includes technology, marketing, sales,

and administration. A soccer team needs strikers as well as a goalie.

Keep tight control on costs by working with a small core team, using free digital tools

whenever possible, working from home, and meeting in public spaces.

Know the audience through intense study of online metrics; find out their needs and

satisfy them; help them solve problems that matter to them; and establish personal

connections both online and face to face at events.

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

Develop some walled-garden spaces for content, such as an application or an email

newsletter, where tech giants like Google and Facebook will not be intermediaries in

the relationship with the audience.

Innovate constantly and be ready to abandon quickly tactics that are not working.

The urge to create databases of digital media in many parts of the world seems to have come

from a belief that collecting this information systematically and making it easy to look for

patterns would help in creating a road map. The filtering mechanisms of some of the databases,

such as SuBMoJuour and Michele’s List, allow a researcher or an entrepreneur to see what might

have worked in a certain place under certain conditions and extract meaning and potential

strategy from the data.

Online databases – freely accessible, constantly updated, and carefully verified – can be an

important tool in the quest to rebuild accountability journalism. The more easily they are shared,

the more comprehensive the data they contain on factors that contribute to sustainability, the

more useful they will be for academic researchers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs themselves.

Collaborations among partners unaccustomed to working together, such as governments,

universities, media associations, foundations, and community organizations, could be the drivers

behind strengthening journalism as an institution, as the Fourth Estate. As our citizens become

more digitally driven, more engaged in social networks, and more determined to participate in

their governance, the key will be more collaboration and less competition. Digital entrepreneurs

cannot meet the challenge of the new media monopolies by using the old zero-sum models of

competition, in which one organization’s loss is another’s gain. The new digital players have to

make the pie bigger by finding new ingredients, and more ingredients, for the pie. This is not just

a business challenge but also a social and political challenge, because in the democratic model of

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MAPPING THE WORLD’S DIGITAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

governance, a well informed public is an essential ingredient for making decisions in the best

interests of the society as a whole.

The road ahead looks a bit scary. Someone mapping a path for digital media organization

today, using the style of a Renaissance map, might show monsters lying at the edge where

unknown territory begins. Today, however the monsters would not be dragons or sea serpents;

they would be technological giants with globally recognized logos. The navigators of these

uncharted waters will need pluck, skill, vision, courage, and creativity to find a path toward

sustainability. It would help if they also had a bit of luck.

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