oa Professionele journalistieke identiteit in een digitale omgeving

The migration of newspapers to a digital domain

The decline of newspapers has caused academics to study its problematic migration from an analogue to a digital environment. Yet while the need for change has become pressingly urgent, news organizations often tend to focus on dwindling circulation as a mere economic or technical problem, which can only be solved by developing a new business model or by inventing an electronic equivalent of the paper. This article argues that the transformation from print to digital in the news business requires a rather profound analysis of the changing conditions of (independent) journalism. It subsequently offers a heuristic for news organisations wanting to reposition themselves vis-à-vis old players (readers, advertisers) and new players (platform providers, search engines) in the media business. Analysis and heuristic combined should help news organizations to answer the question what kind of organization they want to be and what economic, technical and organizational choices may shape their migration to a digital domain.