Situation
The presence of a Public Service Broadcaster (“PSB”) in the market for online text-based news demands careful balance. PSBs play an important role in democratic societies by offering geographic and thematic content which would not be commercially viable for private newspapers, thereby increasing media diversity. However, if a PSB creates content which closely resembles the commercial content of a private newspaper, this can run the risk of crowding out private newspapers, thereby decreasing media diversity.
The Swedish private news organisation Tidningsutgivarna asked us to analyse two things:
First, whether Sveriges Television (SVT) resembles a private digital newspaper in its focus on text-based content relative to video content. To answer this question, we investigated the relationship between the amount of text-based content compared to video-based content at SVT.se.
Second, if consumers view SVT as an alternative to private digital newspapers. To answer this question, we conducted a consumer survey to uncover consumers’ use of SVT.se/the SVT app in conjunction with that of private newspapers.
Outcome
Our analysis revealed that online, text-based news has become the main pillar of SVT’s content, which is a change from broadcasting, which was the original focus area for PSBs. We found that almost a third of all articles published on SVT.se were exclusively text-based while 80% of articles had text as the primary format, meaning that there is significantly more text-based content relative to video content.
Furthermore, we found that consumers consider SVT to be an alternative to private digital newspapers and that the presence of SVT can influence consumers’ subscription choice. Accordingly, 63% of respondents in our survey said that they do not pay for news because of SVT’s content while 19% explicitly chose to unsubscribe from a private digital newspaper due to the presence of SVT.
