Survival is success: journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe

All around Europe, new journalistic ventures are launched on the internet even as legacy media like newspapers and broadcasters are often struggling to adapt to a new communications environment. This report is the first to systematically assess how they are doing. Based on analysis of nine strategic cases from Germany, France, and Italy, it shows that the economics of online news today are as challenging for new entrants as they are for industry incumbents. Though internet use and online advertising is growing rapidly across Europe, it is not clear that this alone will provide the basis for new forms of journalism. Two challenges loom particularly large for all the ventures examined here. First, the market for online news continues to be dominated by legacy media organisations. Second, the market for online advertising is generously supplied and dominated by a few very large players like Google. There are examples of journalistic start-ups that have managed to break even despite these challenges, but they are in a minority. While many new initiatives are inspiring in their journalistic idealism and impressive in their technical inventiveness, most struggle to make ends meet financially. The start-up scene in Europe is still at a stage where survival must be seen as a form of success in itself. The report shows clearly how the opportunities to achieve sustainability differ in important ways from country to country, underlining that what is needed is more than mere imitation of initiative launched in the United States or elsewhere. Moving forward, journalistic entrepreneurs will have to match new forms of internet-enabled journalism with business plans tailored to the particular context each start-up operates in.© RISJ April 2012. Text © Nicola Bruno and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. All additional material © Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism