Dear Business Leaders,
We are living in a time when transformation is not optional, but a must!
Old sectors — old in that their former businesses were based on stable demand, significant fixed assets and predictable consumer behaviour — now have to look this truth in the eye: the game has changed. For the global newspaper press printing industry, it has been an unforgiving and yet clarifying transition.
In the United States, Europe and in emerging markets, full printing plants that once hummed with industrial vigor have fallen quiet. Margins were squeezed by digital. Talent exited. Readers migrated. Advertisers vanished. Economics that made decades of predictable revenue possible disappeared in a handful of years.
But this is not a eulogy.
It is a blueprint.
Because, in this age of structural collapse, some players — not many, but some — opted for reinvention over decay. They pivoted. They rewired their operations. They had reimagined their value proposition, not just for survival, but for the new era of leadership.
Today, I’d like to share their journey — not as a theoretical case study, but as a tactical challenge to any business still tied to a defunct model.
The Structural Decline of Print — and the Cost of Denial
The first thing we need to admit is this: Disruption in the newspaper press business was not unexpected. It was ignored.
Executives ignored early warnings in the late 2000s as cyclical. Digital migration was long considered a passing fad. But year after year, print advertising revenue dropped globally 5–10 percent while digital grew by double digits. Through 2023, more than 2,500 U.S. newspapers had closed. In Europe hundreds of local and regional dailies suffered the same fate.
Much too costly is the business plan of denial.
Case Studies in Reinvention
#1 The New York Times (U.S.) – From Print Publisher to Digital Subscription Leader
The NYT’s digital subscription business generated less than $150M in sales in 2014. Today, the company makes more than $1 billion a year off digital-only products — which can be anything from podcasts to niche newsletters to vertical apps (cooking, games, whatever). They focused on:
- Product unbundling: The unbundling of cooking, crosswords, and audio food content
- Brand repositioning: From newspaper to world lifestyle information brand
- Tech spend: Developing internal platforms and data science skills
Result: NYT is now more profitable than it ever was during its print heyday.
#2 Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) – Editorial Integrity Meets UX
Sweden’s flagship newspaper Dagens Nyheter lost 35% of its audience between 2005 and 2010. In response, they rebuilt their business around user experience and reader trust:
- Added metered paywalls tied to behavior data
- Refocused newsroom on audience-centric journalism
- Real-time analytics for deciding what to cover editorially
Result: Subscriptions, not ads, now account for 80 percent of revenue.
#3 Mediahuis (Belgium/Netherlands) – Real Estate and Platform Strategy Come Face to Face
The owner of NRC and De Standaard, Mediahuis, had employed a hybrid strategy:
- Dumped under-performing real-estate assets
- Outsourced printing to partners
- Platform acquisitions oriented (e.g. Jobat. be for employment classifieds)
Result: Still in business and doing well and have significantly reduced overhead costs.
#4 Gannett (U.S.) – Couldn’t Pivot Quickly Enough
It’s important to include failure. Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, hadn’t leveraged its scale into innovation. Their late-stage digital ramp-up lacked focus and was clouded by debt-fueled M&A.
Lesson: You can’t scale your way out of strategic reinvention.
Key Takeaways
Throughout these accounts, the winners didn’t simply “go digital. They changed what business they were in:
- From newspaper publishers to digital content providers
- Rise of service providers in between advertisers to direct consumers
- Print manufacturers to data-informed subscriber businesses
They used the four principles I tell legacy businesses to adopt:
- Reimagine the core product -Unbundle it, personalize it, variatize it
- Monetize in a different way — Push toward recurring revenue/subscription/platforms
- Turn to what you already have — Real estate, data, trust and brand are not worthless
- Broaden the scope of stakeholder lens — Employees, community, and long-term partners count
The New Playbook for Older Industries
Entrepreneurs in more traditional sectors of the industry — be it logistics, manufacturing or local services — often put the following question to me:
“But Ginio, what do I do with an old operation and waning demand?”
My response is: Take a look at what these media companies did.
They:
- Converted sunk costs to new revenue lines
- Transformed analogue assets to digital ecosystems
- Regained the narrative through a focus toward audience trust
This is not mere transformation — it is strategy rooted in reality.
The Sustainability Mirage — Why Business Model Innovation Must Come First
As a onetime sustainability consultant, I need to say this plainly: No ESG policy will save a company with a flimsy business model.
Too many legacy businesses are being lectured to on the green high slopes of climate change, while their economic core, the business, rots. The better path is this:
Begin with business model reinvention — and “bake in” sustainability, rather than have it sit “on top” of the business.
This is a philosophy that I have brought with me to my clients having transitioned to become a Business Model Innovation Advisor.
Final Thoughts
The newspaper printing industry proves that legacy does not necessarily mean obsolete.
But it doesn’t require courage — the courage to stop clinging to yesterday’s sure thing, to take up an experimental attitude, to think not just about what you’re doing but why it’s changing.
If you are a business in structural decline, please call me. Not of survival — but of rebirth.
The future is not for the disrupted but for the reinventors.
Warm regards,
Ginio Franker | Business Model Innovation Consultant