The recently published 2025 European Media Industry Outlook offers some sobering facts and data about Europe’s news media landscape as it maps ways forward for the industry.

The report stated “media viability is at risk in nearly all EU member states.” Additionally, “there are very few countries where newspaper publishing is viable,” according to the report.

Print continues to be profitable

While digital revenues of many news publishers have evidently grown in recent years, and revenue structures have diversified, print continues to be the largest source of revenue.

The EU report says traditional sources — including print — of revenue accounted for 89% of the total revenue generated by the sector in 2024.

Building on solid ground

On a more positive note, the report’s authors believe the news sector has solid foundations and should build on that.

Europeans are still avid consumers of news; 87% of them engage with news on a daily basis. European consumers also trust traditional news media brands more than social media channels, underlying “the relevance of European professional media.”

The report pointed out the European news industry “needs to increase its focus on audience-first approaches” to compete.

This sentiment was echoed at the recent INMA Media Innovation Week, which called for the strengthening of audience-led strategies: “A newsroom structure that begins with the needs, habits, and identities of readers rather than the rhythms of print production.”

More tech is needed

While the report noted traditional news media — publishers, radio, and television — are adapting their operations to a new media environment and are taking up new technologies, more needs to be done. The news industry in Europe needs more investments and “application of leading tech” to make it “more competitive.”

According to the report, in the European Union, “only seven of the top 800” R&D (research and development) investing companies are media companies. It emphasised that the growing number of investors putting money in media tech “scale-ups” is happening outside Europe, which may hollow out the independence of the news industry.

It also noted “proprietary or EU-based technological solutions can help European media scale up and retain their sovereignty.” For example, Europe is mainly dependent on non-EU solutions in Artificial Intelligence, and, overall, usage of AI is not high.

By the end of 2024, 35% of news media organisations in the European Union had adopted AI technologies.

Protecting the brand 

Finally, the report urged news organisations to protect their intellectual property (IP) and brands; this relates to AI technologies and news publishers’ data and content usage.

Similarly, News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller recently warned of a threat to Australia’s sovereignty from big technology companies violating publishers’ IP and copyrights.

“We are being challenged to accept another wave of publicly endorsed theft, and an assault on our privacy, our identities … and our livelihoods,” he said. “If it was a video game, it would be called Grand Theft Australia.”

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