Media landscapes in the Mediterranean area

Transcription

1 Communication Handbook - Factsheet 10.b Version 1 April b Media landscapes in the Mediterranean area A summary of the MED media landscapes based on information from the European Journalism Centre. For more information visit

2 These notes are based on a report written by the European Journalism Centre and copyright for the information remains with the EJC. for more information Please note: not all Mediterranean countries were found in the database, thus the collection can only serve as a starting point Italy Print media: + The written press market has been impacted by the overall decrease of advertising revenues in recent years + The Italian print newspaper market can be divided into four main segments: paid-for national dailies; paid-for local and regional dailies; free dailies distributed in some cities; magazines + Freesheets are a recent development in the Italian press market, the five free dailies in Italy distribute more than 4 million copies per day + The periodical publications market includes 199 papers; 136 are monthly magazines; 63 are weekly magazines + Radio reaches 73% of the population aged more than 11 years old + Radio Uno, a public station, reaches over 6 million listeners on an average day + RTL, a private network reaches 5 million listeners on an average day + RAI and Mediaset control 80% of the Italian audience + Audience shares are still concentrated among national free channels, despite increasing interest in Pay TV + Traditional TV maintains its centrality within Italian media consumption, viewed by 86% of Italians regularly (3 times or more, per week) + TV is the medium Italians trust the least (only 35% believe TV news coverage is trustworthy) New Media Online: % (30 million) of the population between 11 and 74 years old say they have access to the internet from any place (home, work, school) + 10 million of these people say they have an internet connection at home 2

3 + Broadband internet is still low compared to other European countries + Lombardia and Lazio: 45% of households have broadband internet vs. less than 30% in southern regions + Most visited websites 2009: Msn.it 5 million visitors per day; Virgilio.it 2.4 million visitors per day Digital Media: + All newspapers now have digital version, most visited: La Repubblica and La Gazzetta dello sport often lacking in content, services offered and aesthetics + Some blogs have been very successful, such as Il Blog di Beppe Grillo, a TV entertainer France Print media: + The written press in France is encountering a crisis, due to decrease in advertising revenues + The written press in France is divided into four different sectors: - The national daily press known as PQN, for Presse quotidienne nationale, with 11 paid-for newspapers totalling a circulation of 1.64m copies - The local daily press, or PQR for Presse quotidienne régionale, is doing slightly better, its 47 newspapers making 5.14m copies - The weekly newspapers: the 22 national titles combine for a circulation of 6.3m copies, an increase of 2.13 percent since The 246 local weeklies combine for 7.5m readers, with a slight but regular decrease. - Niche magazines are a traditional feature of French media life, with 97.2 percent of the population reading one per month o Free sheets are also doing remarkably well, with 7 percent of the population reading one every day + More than 1,200 stations, every weekday, 42 million people listen to radio; the generalists channels are more popular (RTL, France Inter) than stations with music formats. + Radio France (state-owned) owns the five major stations in France + TF1, the leading private channel, has seen its audience slip regularly since It is now far from its 30 percent market share domination 3

4 + Twelve new and very dynamic channels are accessible freely since 2005 (and a few other locally), and in 2008, almost 80 percent of TV owners were already TNT viewers as well. + President Sarkozy s decided to ban progressive advertising on public channels (Five channels are regrouped under the France Televisions holding): no clear solution was set up to replace these advertising revenues. New media: + 62% of households have internet access, France ranks sixth in the world of internet users + 28% of French people have read a newspaper online and 27% have accessed a TV or radio programmes online. + Almost every newspaper has an online edition. Some of them are heavyweights on the French web, such as lequipe.fr (sports daily), with 48.5m visits in December, 2008, and French daily lemonde.fr with over 40m visits + The present trend among French newspapers is to forgo all-for-free web editions and charge for some content. + Eighty-two people out of 100 have a mobile phone subscription in France. Of these users, 31 percent are using mobile Internet (8.3 million people o The main newspapers all have versions of their online editions that are compatible with mobile phones + France is the country with the most blogs per inhabitant 2.5million active blogs + Blogs are an increasingly legitimate source (and more reactive) than newspapers on certain specialities. Spain Print Media: + The most-read newspaper is Marca, a sports newspaper, with 2.7m daily readers. The second most-read paper is the free daily 20 Minutos, with a readership of 2.5m. + The economic crisis has seriously impacted Spanish newspapers of all kinds advertising revenues for printed publications dropped 20 percent in Regarding circulation, there has been a continuous loss of sales in the paid-for press, including national, regional, as well as specialised, since The drastic fall of advertising income has limited the number of local editions of free newspapers and similarly reduced the quantity of copies distributed in the big cities. 4

5 + The leading radio network was Cadena SER, which belongs to PRISA group, with about 4.7m daily listeners according to EGM. Other popular stations are Onda Cero (2.3m), Cadena COPE (2m), RNE (RTVE) (1.2m) and Punto Radio (524,000). + Spanish people watched an average of 227 minutes per day. + The television market in Spain is in the midst of deep change. + On the one hand, the proliferation of platforms and broadcasting channels has fragmented market Online: + 48% percent of Spanish people are occasional Internet users o only a little more than a third of the population are daily Internet users + There are a great number of online news publications nearly 1,300 were counted in 2005 but only few are well-developed in editorial and business terms + Elmundo.es is the most popular Other Media Outlets: + Weblogs SL, founded in 2005, this company edits 40 thematic blogs + Reaches 14 million readers per month. Development Trends: The main challenge for press publishers seems to be how to gain (or, at least, preserve) their readership and recover advertising revenue in a context where citizens are quickly substituting paper publications with digital alternative. Greece Print Media: + 82 newspapers with national circulation + 8 are morning editions, 13 evening, 22 Sunday and 16 weekly newspapers circulate locally or regionally + Free sheets: City Press has the highest with 271,000 readers, followed by Metro with 250,000 readers 5

6 + It is worth noting that the freesheet press has taken the lead in terms of advertising revenue. In 2007, Metro made about 6.1m euro from advertising + Sunday newspapers take the lead with 56.2 percent of annual sales. Evening and weekly newspapers share the second place (11.9 percent and 11.4 percent respectively) + Today, the press is the second-most important source of information for Greeks (after television) + Skai Radio (owned by Alafouzos Publishing Company) takes the lead (10.8 percent) over Rythmos (8.4 percent), which has a music format + The vast majority of stations are private and transmit locally or regionally + There are 3.7M Greek households equipped with television sets + Mega Channel (22.1 percent) and Antenna (16.8%) control the market, followed by Alpha TV (15.1 percent) and Star (11.4 percent) Online: + Four of every 10 Greek households have Internet access + One in three Greeks is using the Internet on a weekly basis, 66 percent use it daily + 64 percent of Greeks use advanced Internet services such as telephone and video calls via Internet, forums, blogs, music downloads and Internet games Digital Media: + Focusing on digital media, most of the media companies have developed portals Development Trends: + The majority of Greek media outlets managed to survive the global economic crisis of 2008 and However, the media industry still has to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis in terms of sales, loss of profit, advertising expenditures, staff salaries and emerging costs. Slovenia Print Media: + Gross value of the advertising pie in Slovenian media in 2008 was million euro, 15 percent higher than in More than half of the advertising income goes to television (55 percent), print media share of advertising pie is

7 percent, while outdoor media (7.1 percent), radio stations (4.4 percent), and online media (3.5 percent) together get approximately 15 percent of the pie. + The small scale of the Slovenian print media market makes it difficult to distinguish between national newspapers and regional newspapers, or between regional newspapers and local ones. + The sold circulation of all daily newspapers in Slovenia is approximately 260,000 copies, with a readership of 1.17 million readers and 16.6 percent share of the gross advertising pie in Approximately 242,000 people in Slovenia read the free, magazine-type daily newspaper Žurnal The whole of Slovenia together with all its population is covered by few radio stations, namely Radio Slovenija 1, Radio Slovenija 2, and Radio Slovenija 3. The largest coverage among private radio stations is that of the non-profit radio station Radio Ognjišče + According to estimates, gross advertising income value of the Slovenian television advertising market was 300 million euro in Public RTV Slovenia is the largest television broadcaster in Slovenia and prepares two national television programmes, having about 35% of viewership New Media: + In 2008 the percentage of households that had access to the Internet reached 59 percent, that is slightly under the average of the European Union (62 percent) + The number of mobile telephone subscribers able to access the Internet via hand-held has been growing rapidly due to the fact that the number of UMTS subscribers is in constant growth. + The website with the highest number of visitors per month is Google.com (more than 893,000 different visitors; a reach of 84 percent), the most visited domestic website is Slovenian search engine Najdi.si with a reach of 75 percent. 7