Press funding and strategies in online and offline business: the Portuguese case

Abstract

Media managers are facing a variety of profound and disruptive challenges generated by the impact of digitization and platformization on the production, distribution and consumption of media goods. Interestingly, platforms provide users with the opportunity to become providers of information ('produsers'). The technological ecology requires publishing organizations to constantly rethink and adjust their competitive strategies and business models to achieve financial sustainability. Based on interviews with media industry players, this article intends to understand Portuguese newspaper companies' funding models, business challenges in a pre-pandemic period, and how managers were reacting and adapting their practices. This study has found that the companies demonstrated the predominant implementation of management practices aimed at exploring mixed revenue sources - that is, through the traditional activity of selling advertising and newspapers and the support of paper and the sale of digital advertising content. Companies where the main source of revenue came from a mixed-model ended up, for the most part, investing more, or having more participation, in digital, with a few exceptions.