Digital-Native Publishers Settle In to Face Legacy Constraints, with a Side of Reader Revenue

‘El Español’ on mobile phones. [Photo: Nacho Gomez, used under a Creative Commons License]

“It was around this time last year that things were starting to look a little dicey for the media industry’s once breathlessly-hyped digital unicorns,” Joe Pompeo wrote for Vanity Fair this week. BuzzFeed, Vice, Mashable, and Vox, “which once heralded the dawn of a new media age — replete with massive valuations, large fund-raising hauls, and millennial sex appeal — now appeared to exhibit some traits of the brands that they once attempted to disrupt.”

A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, three years in the making, echoes some of Pompeo’s take on digital natives’ upcoming “frigid winter,” this time for European publishers.

Christine Schmidt, writing for Nieman Lab, shares a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.