News as a Service: Adoption of Web 2.0 by Online Newspapers

This paper presents a study of the adoption of Web 2.0 by Danish online newspapers and discusses the future of the newspaper in the light of contemporary shifts from mass media and printed products to social media and web services. First the context of the study is presented. Then a methodology for collecting and analyzing data on Web 2.0 adoption is suggested. Data from two surveys carried out with an interval of 14 months (2008/2009) is discussed. These data reveal that most online newspapers have adopted blogs and commenting and many have adopted other interactive features such as voting and sharing of user-generated content, e.g. photos and video. The most significant development in the period between the two observation sets is a rapid diffusion of article tools for bookmarking and sharing of content via social networks or aggregation sites. The main conclusions are that the news industry will have to embrace the emerging “media-as-a-service” paradigm and that the future challenge for web services will be to leverage informational and social connectivity.