Abstract: Today online newspapers are putting a lot of resources into their news sites without profiting from them. They have to find ways to gain from them in order to keep them going. Lately there has been a move from print to multimedia, i.e. news is only a part among other services at the news sites and is presented as audio and video as well. We have conducted interviews at nine local newspapers in Sweden about their current situation and future plans. We have also used a cooperative scenario building technique aiming at finding new online services that could be profitable with both newspaper management and end users. The objective of this paper is to describe the current situation for these newspapers and to discuss possible new future services. Examples of services from the workshops are e.g. advertisement on demand and intermediary services.
Ihlström, C., Lundberg, J., Rehnström, C., and Vimarlund, V. (2002). Online Newspapers in Search for Profitable Services. In Challenges and Achievements in E-business and E-work, Prague, Czech republic, 1455-1462. [pdf]