World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

This paper contains a proposal of new business models for journalism that has been established by analyzing leading trends and observing innovative companies. It also reviews the scientific literature on business models in the study of media management and economics in order to summarize their main ontological features. The typologies that exist have focused on part of the business model—revenue streams—and have not considered other crucial aspects, such as the creation of value. From our point of view, the potential business models for journalism fluctuate between scale and focus, influence and the potential to go viral, content and service, production and aggregation, and advertising and subscription. Six types of business models capable of subsidizing journalism activities appear between these extremes: 1) platform based, 2) viral content, 3) distributed journalism, 4) focused journalism, 5) curated and aggregated content, and 6) global media. This typology includes some of the existing solutions for making journalism sustainable in a digital paradigm dominated by technological giants in which legacy media has lost ground.