Democratizing Journalism – How User‐Generated Content and User Communities Affect Publishers’ Business Models

Abstract

Publishers, today, are struggling with their business model: Their efforts to convert traditional content into digital products seem to be insufficient as recipients expect more than simply the mere digitalization of content. Dissatisfied with solely being informed by selected journalists, modern recipients are often interested in acquiring information from various sources, in discussing with others, or even in contributing with their own content. Hence, recipients seem to evolve from being simply readers to contributors themselves. With regard to the established term ‘user‐generated content’, we refer to those co‐creating recipients as users. To underline these assumptions, the present study explores (1) users’ expectations of sources of content and (2) their willingness to provide their own content. Our findings show that both user‐generated content and professional journalists’ content is of value to users. Second, we show that users are mainly driven to contribute by their own expertise, welfare of others, and personal acceptance in the community. With this study, we consider mainly the changed user behaviour in order to derive implications of user involvement for future business models of publishers, in particular on the customer value proposition as well as key resources and key processes.

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