The print media convergence: Overall trends and the COVID-19 pandemic impact

Sheresheva, Marina; Skakovskaya, Lyudmila; Bryzgalova, Elena; Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton; Shitikova, Helen Article The print media convergence: Overall trends and the COVID-19 pandemic impact Journal of Risk and Financial Management Provided in Cooperation with: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Basel Suggested Citation: Sheresheva, Marina; Skakovskaya, Lyudmila; Bryzgalova, Elena; AntonovOvseenko, Anton; Shitikova, Helen (2021) : The print media convergence: Overall trends and the COVID-19 pandemic impact, Journal of Risk and Financial Management, ISSN 1911-8074, MDPI, Basel, Vol. 14, Iss. 8, pp. 1-17, https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm14080364 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/258468 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Journal of Risk and Financial Management Article The Print Media Convergence: Overall Trends and the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact Marina Sheresheva 1,* , Lyudmila Skakovskaya 2, Elena Bryzgalova 2, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko 3 and Helen Shitikova 4   Citation: Sheresheva, Marina, Lyudmila Skakovskaya, Elena Bryzgalova, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, and Helen Shitikova. 2021. The Print Media Convergence: Overall Trends and the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact. Journal of Risk and Financial Management 14: 364. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm 14080364 Academic Editors: Rohail Hassan and Samad M. E. Sepasgozar Received: 30 May 2021 Accepted: 31 July 2021 Published: 7 August 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1Department of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 119991 Moscow, Russia 2Department of Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations, Tver State University, Zhelyabov Str., 33, 170100 Tver, Russia; [email protected] (L.S.); [email protected] (E.B.) 3Department of Publishing and Bibliology, Moscow Polytechnic University, 115280 Moscow, Russia; anton.antonov[email protected] 4Publishing Department, Publishing Advertising Alliance Ltd., Tverskaya Str., 20, Bld 3, 125009 Moscow, Russia; [email protected] *Correspondence: m.sher[email protected] Abstract: The study presented in the paper aims to analyze the Russian print media market before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the prospects of local media transformation in the challenging environment. In the pre-pandemic decade, there was a growing body of literature on media convergence in emerging markets confirming that this concept is growing in importance as a strategic path of conventional media transformation. Still, the research on the Russian conventional media transformation is scarce, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic risks on Russian print media and their business models have not been investigated so far. To fill the gap, we combined desk research, processing of published industry statistics, and data obtained by means of expert interviews. The results confirm that in the first decades of the 21st century Russian print media paid less attention to the opportunities of media convergence than Western ones. At the same time, those Russian conventional media that set ambitious goals for their future considered the adoption of the media convergence approach as crucial, even before the pandemic. The findings show the lack of systemic measures to improve the overall situation on the national media market that faces difficult times, and the need to take into account pandemic risks in the print media management activities. Keywords: media convergence; print media; communication; digitalization; SARS-CoV-2; coronavirus; Russia 1. Introduction In 2020–2021, the COVID-19 pandemic influenced all parts of human life. It has had an unprecedented impact on the lifestyle, consumer behavior and quality of life (Laato et al. 2020;Sheth 2020;Berezka et al. 2021;Sheresheva et al. 2021), and on business activity in all sectors of the global economy (Amankwah-Amoah et al. 2020;Bartik et al. 2020; Cavanagh et al. 2020;Donthu and Gustafsson 2020;Polukhina et al. 2021;Sheresheva 2020). The international community “is now in the “acute” stage of reconsidering its problems and risks, capabilities and coordination in the face of COVID-19 and the Global Recession of 2020” (Bobylev and Grigoryev 2020, p. 4). The current economic situation is highly challenging for print media which faced the need for major changes in the decades before the pandemic, due to digitalization and globalization (Picard 2014). Emergency anti-pandemic measures that resulted in reduced incomes of people, as well as financial problems of investors and advertisers, have come as an unexpected and harsh blow to print media submerged in the process of search for new business decisions and new business models. As a result, they have suffered a substantial volume of additional economic losses in 2020–2021. J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm14080364 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jrfm J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 2 of 17 At the same time, pandemics served as a facilitator of media digitalization. Due to restrictions and the need for distancing “multiscreen and digitalization” became “new signs of media consumption, which began to be most clearly traced in 2020” (Zakharova et al. 2021, p. 147). Media industry actors struggling to survive started not only to optimize their operations and look for loans but intensified their search for innovative decisions and models of further development. The management of periodicals has become “the entry point of media convergence” (Chen and Chen 2021, p. 7). In this regard, the media convergence concept impressively grew in importance and found itself in even higher demand on the current agenda of print media. There is obvious interest to this topic also in emerging markets (Emwinromwankhoe 2020; Fadilla and Sukmono 2021;Lu 2020;Wu 2021). Still, no research has been undertaken on the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic for media convergence in Russia. There is no clear understanding in Russia regarding how national print media react to the new unprecedented challenges and try to cope with them. The study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the Russian print media market before and during the COVID-19 pandemics, as well as the prospects of local media transformation in the challenging environment. The overall goal is to find better ways to cope with the pandemic crisis and to use the opportunities of the media convergence approach for the revival and success of Russian print media. The study contributes to the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic impact on the functioning of various industries, as well as to the literature on the media convergence in emerging markets. From our point of view, the potential of media convergence in Russia is not yet fully recognized and still underused, in spite of the growing understanding that there is no alternative to integrate organically the technology of traditional paper media and new media. Additional confirmation of this understanding is that since 2021 the experts of the Association of Russian Communications Agencies (AKAR) started to calculate not only advertising volume spread among distributing media, but also advertising volume by type of content (Table 1). AKAR experts underline the effect of convergence on the business process of mass media in Russia and, in particular, of print media. They rightly comment that in terms of publishing content, advertising revenues from the digital component almost doubled the revenues from the traditional print press: 15.9 billion rubles against 8.0 billion rubles (AKAR 2021a). Table 1. Content specific advertising in 2020. Content Types Total Amount, bln Roubles Change to Previous Year, % Video content, including: 190.1 −3 •traditional TV 169.0 −3 •cinema (screen ads) 0.3 −75 • online video (stream + VOD) 20.8 +5 Audio content, including: 11.9 −29 •air broadcast radio (FM/AM) 11.2 −30 •digital-audio 0.7 +3 Publishing content, including 23.9 −22 •print 8.0 −47 •digital 15.9 +3 Out of Home 31.9 −25 Internet services 215.6 +4 TOTAL 473.4 −4 We analyzed both secondary data sourced from government documents and officially published reports, and the results of expert interviews, to have a broader picture of contemporary market situation and prospects for the near future. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2comprises the literature review on the issues of media convergence, crossmedia and multiplatform concepts that serve J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 3 of 17 as the theoretical background of the present research. Section 3presents the methods implemented in the study and briefly describe the sources of data. In Section 4, we clarify the emerging trend of media convergence on a number of cases from different countries, and then discuss developments on the Russian print media market in the pre-pandemic and pandemic period, as well as the challenges incurred on the market actors by the COVID-19 pandemic. Section 5contains conclusions, research limitations, recommendations and directions for future research. 2. Literature Review In recent decades, an understanding has emerged that print media need to adapt to new conditions and new readers’ demands caused by digitalization. Actually, this is due to the major shift in journalism as a whole at the turn of the century. In the second half of the 20th century, journalism took shape as a system of professional activities, a set of professions, and a set of scientific disciplines as well. At the beginning of the 21st century, as a result of the development of Internet technologies, journalism has undergone a major transformation due to the urgent need for new principles of work and new requirements for journalists (Aldridge and Evetts 2003;Singer 2003;Le Cam et al. 2019). Previously, different media types developed as independent and self-sufficient, with their own genre originality and their own peculiarities in the creation and distribution of content. Under the new conditions, in less than one decade, the boundaries between the previously different media types were blurred, completely new forms of the content presentation appeared (Domingo and Heinonen 2008). One witnessed an interpenetration of genres, and some genres have completely disappeared. Online journalism stepped into the scene as a new generation after conventional journalism and broadcast journalism (Cohen 2002). Some conventional media have fully evolved from newspapers to online media, some continued to work in the traditional format, but could no longer remain within the old paradigm of exclusively print media. “Mature and saturated markets, loss of audiences not highly interested in news, the diminishing effectiveness of the mass media businesses model, the lingering effects of the economic crisis, and the impact of digital competitors” (Picard 2014, p. 488) triggered an intensive search for new approaches that could meet the challenges of the globalized and digitalized world, and this has led to the emergence of the media convergence concept (Arsenijevi´c and Andevski 2015;Baranova 2018). The initial perception of media convergence has evolved very differently in different countries and regions of the world. The researchers noted that there was no consensus even among experienced expert practitioners (Dwyer 2010;Kim 2019). One should also mention the two related to convergence concepts, namely the crossmedia concept where crossmedia communication refers to “a process whereby two or more media platforms are engaged at the same time in communicating related content” (Erdal 2007, p. 52), and the multiplatform concept where more platforms are engaged in the communication process in an integrated way (Syvertsen and Ytreberg 2006). One more term, namely multi-mediatization, is closely related to the media convergence concept (Baringhorst 2018). The researchers noted that one started talking about multi-mediatization back in the 1980s, though then this term meant not a change in the media content towards multi-media content, but the interweaving of the capitals of various media types” (Kiriya 2010, p. 24). Since 1997, when the European Commission issued “Green Paper on the convergence of the telecommunications, media and information technology sectors, and the implications for Regulation” back in December 1997 (European Commission 1997), the term “media convergence” has firmly established itself in the lexicon of the mass media market actors. All in all, this term means the merging of formerly discrete communication technologies/media and of their functions and associated genres, facilitated by digitalization (Chandler and Munday 2011). J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 4 of 17 The next stage of this process is due to the interpenetration of different media types content based on the growing use of the Internet, the emergence of sites presenting traditional media, and the unification of visual, audiovisual, graphic and text forms of information broadcasting, and the arising online publications as a fundamentally new media type. One could now talk about modern features of convergence and multi-mediatization. As experts noted in the midst of a radical restructuring of traditional media types, the keywords of the modern editorial office and the modern media space were “speed, mobility, multimedia, universality, interactivity” (Kachkaeva 2010). On the audience side, as Jenkins (2006) underlined, there is a new request for not only search for information but also for taking part in all stages of content production. Moreover, some authors considered that there are two intertwining emergent phenomena: the convergent communications sector and the digital creative economy (Latzer 2013). Domingo and Heinonen (2008) pointed out that the web has brought communications to a completely new path of development, pushing forward a highly diverse communication environment in the true “Castells” sense: a network of communication flows between equally influential nodes capable of acting as senders and recipients of information (Castells 1996) instead of one-way communication flows from several central points to a broad passive audience. In line with this trend, more and more new tools began to appear to enhance the effect of presence, gamification of media content, etc. Even the production of news now involves both representatives of various professions (designers, programmers, etc.) and the audience itself (Novikova and Kiriya 2018). This, in turn, required significant organizational changes and new management skills. As W. Chen and Y. Chen conclude on the example of sci-tech journals, “periodicals should actively use big data to formulate precise services and “customer first” concepts for providing differentiated services, build a cluster development platform for journals, expand distribution channels by leveraging new technology, connect with the counterpart industry, and set up an online new media communication model” (Chen and Chen 2021, p. 1). Wikström and Ellonen (2012) investigated how four print media firms have incorporated social media features in their online businesses and how these social media features influence and reshape their online business models. At the core lies the transformation of the firms’ value propositions. This transformation has repercussions on the firms’ relationship both with its consumers and its traditional content contributors such as journalists and freelance writers. The new value proposition also requires the firms to acquire new competencies in order to be able to reap the full benefit of their social media investments. What is important is that in the cases presented by the researchers the firms have not been able to do so since they have not allowed the social media features to influence their online revenue models (Wikström and Ellonen 2012). These cases unveil the high difficulty of organizational changes implied on print media by the new reality. Some authors underline the simple fact that before entering the highly competitive field of media convergence, it is necessary to have digital literacy—the ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information on various digital platforms (Lawson-Borders 2006;Prayogi et al. 2020). In this connection, one should admit that the pandemics pushed companies from different industries to digital transformation in their business models (McKinsey 2020;Priyono et al. 2020;Ritter and Pedersen 2020). We can see that media convergence is understood both as a technological process in journalism and as an applied term, as the fusion of form and the fusion of content. “Technological convergence, media convergence and organizational convergence have helped change the way in which news is made” (Erdal 2007, p. 51). Thus, we can define convergence as the fusion of different media and technology types (print media, broadcast, TV, photojournalism, etc.) within an online publication. That means that there is underlying consolidation of technologies and services in divisions of one publishing house or telecommunications company. J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 5 of 17 In Russia, academics and practitioners also believe that “media convergence is a process in the modern media industry that is directly related to technical advances in information transmission and is based on the principle of crossmedia—one-time production of content and its multiple replications on different media platforms” (Baranova 2010, p. 93) but reasonably emphasize that “converged editorial offices of specific media types are not as autonomous as in conventional holding structures” (Kiriya 2010, p. 24). The very concept of convergence initially perceived in Russia with doubt. “At the beginning of the 21st century, when I first heard the phrase “convergent editorial office”, it seemed like another bold invention of Western colleagues, which certainly will not take root on Russian soil soon,” said Russian expert Anna Kachkaeva.—“The newspaper people who came from the World Association of Newspapers congresses, could not fully explain the essence of the beginning global changes” (Kachkaeva 2010, p. 6). Some survey results indicated the move towards the media convergence process in Russia (Baranova 2010). In general, in Russia, not only the widespread acceptance of the media convergence concept but also the full use of the new opportunities that were arising with the emergence of the Internet, took place later than it happened in Europe. For example, while most European print media have added “social media features” to their web-based information services in order to allow users to participate in the production of content (Wikström and Ellonen 2012), many Russian newspapers and magazines, especially on the regional level, were hesitating with such activity. 3. Materials and Methods The overall goal of the study conducted in November 2020–May 2021 was to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on the print media convergence, with additional focus on the Russian market, and thus to elaborate recommendations for print media activity in the new reality taking into account national specifics. The research questions were as follows: RQ1. What are the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic for media convergence in Russia? RQ2. How national print media react on the new unprecedented challenges and try to cope with them? To obtain the data, we used a combination of desk research, processing of published industry statistics and analysis of qualitative empirical data, collected by means of expert interviews. The expert interviews as a qualitative method allows deviation from the order of questions established in the guide to deeper understand experts’ opinions, attitudes and experiences (Legard et al. 2003) were helpful to better access the developments on the Russian print media market. Five expert interviews of approximately 1 h duration were gathered, transcribed and analyzed. This allowed us to highlight the importance of the media convergence concept for the print media sector in the context of big challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis. 4. Results and Discussion 4.1. Irreversible Trend of Media Convergence: Similar Cases from Different Countries The advantages of internet sources of information (not only online media but also search services, social networks, forums, the blogosphere), in turn, provoked a large-scale and widespread relocation of the attention of information consumers (readers, viewers, and listeners), and therefore advertisers, from traditional mass media types to the global network sources. The print media have suffered the greatest losses in competition with the Internet. For example, Newsweek, one of the world’s most renowned and respected print media companies, became the leader of sad changes in the early 2010s. In mid-October 2012, Newsweek announced its complete phasing out of its paper version from the beginning of 2013 and its transition to digital.” New economic realities have left no other options for the journal management. In 2012, Newsweek accumulated $50 million in debt, the weekly lost J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 6 of 17 about $40 million a year, and its circulation has more than halved over the past ten years, to 1.5 million copies” (Grabar 2013). Newsweek was far from the only print media casualty in the US market in the second decade of the XXI century: prior to that, in 2010, the weekly U.S. News & World Report announced its transition to the Internet. A bit later, the same fate awaited other print editions. In 2016–2020, according to expert evaluations, even the largest newspapers in the United States, such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times, have declined in circulation revenue. USA Today led the decline over this four-year period with a negative 45%; the Chicago Tribune achieved a similar figure ( − 44%). Just as alarming, albeit smaller, was the decline for the New York Times ( − 26%), and even less for The Wall Street Journal ( − 16%), despite the fact that by 2020 it remained the only newspaper in the United States with a circulation of about 1 million copies. USA Today also had a circulation of about a million copies at the beginning of the four-year recession, but by 2020 it had almost halved to 486,000 copies. For the New York Times, circulation of 410 thousand copies by 2020 turned out to be less than that of USA Today (MediaMedia News 2020)—despite the fact that back in 2018 the number of subscribers to the New York Times print version was about a million copies (GIPP 2019). As another example, the process of declining circulation in the United States led to the fact that two daily newspapers in Salt Lake City, namely Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, announced in October 2020 the transition to a weekly edition by 2021; Deseret News also announced the closure of their printing house. All such reductions immediately led to the personnel dismissal, both creative in editorial offices and production in printing houses (Edmonds 2020). The downward trend in print media circulation became clearly seen in the early 2010s in Western Europe. In Germany, the daily Frankfurter Rundschau went bankrupt, followed by the Financial Times Deutschland and others; in France, La Tribune refused the printed version, followed by France Soir, etc. However, the new reality for print media did not look the same everywhere, even in the period of the fiercest competition with internet sources. In the UK, for example, in 2016, sales of printed versions of books and journals, on the contrary, increased by 8%, while sales of electronic versions decreased by 3%. The volume of print sales, according to the British Publishers Association, was then about £ 3 billion—the maximum since 2012 (Oskin and Martynov 2017). In addition, the press development in the Asia-Pacific region countries, especially in China, turned out to be significantly different from how it happened on the American continent and in Western Europe. There, in the early 2010s, the print press held its position in the advertising market with greater success, while the worldwide known US media, such as the aforementioned Newsweek, already started to announce their print versions termination. Despite the fact that in the early 2010s there was a decrease in the share of newspaper advertising in the total media advertising volume, Chinese newspapers outpaced television by more than 15.6% in terms of advertising revenue growth until June 2011 (Cui 2011). In China, the print press, in general, remained more resilient by 2020 than the press in most other parts of the world but internet sources took a leading role too, both in the audience attention and in the advertising market (Duan 2020). Along with the losses incurred by the Chinese press in the unequal struggle with the advantages of the Internet, there is also a quite negative impact of the state that concentrated the ownership rights on the main Chinese media, including the Chinese press. As Li (2012) underlined, stateowned media must fulfill the task of ideological propaganda, and newspaper is one of the most important tools for ensuring ideological influence, which is the main obstacle to its development. For example, there are still no publishing companies that could completely dispose of their shares on the stock market. The state form of ownership dominates in the newspaper industry. By 2021, though both the state and private businesses can officially own a newspaper in China, the state-owned newspapers are the leading ones, including J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 7 of 17 the Cankao Xiaoxi (Reference News), the Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) and the Global Times that have their own distribution networks abroad. Private or partly state-owned press prevails only in regions. In the world’s largest media market, the United States, the New York Times reported in August 2019 4.7 million total subscribers (print plus digital); its digital subscription revenue was $112.6 million, up 14% year-on-year. And the Guardian reported their second quarter and fiscal year revenues in August 2019, NYT at the time of reporting. In addition, according to investors.nytco.com, NYT earned $58 million in Q2 from digital product advertising alone. This is 48.1% of all revenues of the publication for the quarter. NYT earned $45 million on other products, which is 30% higher than last year’s figures” (NYTCO 2019). The Guardian’s reporting showed that a significant share of its publication revenues are personal receipts from readers: 655 thousand users regularly donate money to support publication, in 2018 they were joined by another 300 thousand one-time donors. As the media editor The Guardian Jim Waterson reported in August 2019 that publication revenues grew by 3% and amounted to £ 224 million over the year. Among all items of income, advertising was 40%, and revenue from readers was 28%. Readers’ income grew by 2% over the year, while advertising fell by 1%. The Guardian received 56% of its revenues from its digital products and only 43% from printing, and this figure was steadily declining. (Waterson 2020). Also, in Israel market demonstrated trends similar to the mentioned above. As General Director of CIS Media Solutions Ilya Bass underlined, in 2019 there were almost two dozen newspapers published in the country, daily and weekly. As a rule, the daily newspapers published in larger volumes and with special supplements on Thursday or Friday. Most of them tended to abandon print publications in favor of electronic ones, and the main players in the electronic media market were traditional media published in a special format. According PwC forecast, in Israel by 2021 digital media revenues from advertising could be almost equal to those of traditional print media, with more than half of the ads displayed on mobile devices. With the onset of the pandemic, a low mood dominated the European media market. In March 2020, the European press commented on the stock market crash that chilled all markets and reported that the advertising industry “is facing a tsunami, the magnitude of which it is still trying to measure and enumerate the collateral damage to the media” (Debouté2020) . “Globally, the annual investment prospects of advertisers, which usually follow the GDP curve, are mechanically revised downwards,” complained Le Figaro. “Analysts predicted that the global market volume will be $710 billion this year (of which almost 400 billion in digital form), with an increase of 4%. Now, obviously, there will be much less (a decline of 30 to 50 billion in investments), with a market that will be impacted by a hitherto unknown level in the absence of any data. 2020 was really meant to be a year of glory. However, after the cancellation of major sporting events, including the football Euro, which has been pushed back to 2021, doubts arise about the Tokyo Olympics, and therefore the high market volume (Debouté2020). As an example, let us consider the French advertising market. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) Treasurer & CEO Jean-Luc Chetrit lamented that in March 2020 “ad revenues are down 40% year on year, and the trend will accelerate further to reach 70% to 80% of revenue losses in April”. Television is far from the only media outlet affected. “We see the same for the press, or radio, where we expect equivalent cuts” (Cassini 2020). Jean-Luc Chetrit was echoed by colleagues from the industry advertising syndicate AACC (l’Association des agences conseil en communication). They stated that more than twothirds of agencies were preparing for the transition to partial unemployment and expected a general decline in advertising activity by 70%. Long-term and more moderate (in terms of the scale of the recession) forecasts were made by the Union of Consulting Firms and Media purchase in France (Udecam) president Gautier Piquet. Based on a slow recovery of eighteen months scenario and a full return to normal in 2021–2022, G. Piquet stated: “We estimate for 2020, based on up-to-date J. Risk Financial Manag. 2021,14, 364 8 of 17 scenarios, a 20% drop in media investment for television, 13.4% for radio, 28% for the press, 5.7% for digital media, 19.8% for outdoor advertising and 30% for the cinema. The overall decline from 12% to 14% . . . provided that the state encourages economic recovery through innovative measures such as a tax credit for investments in the communications market” (Richebois 2020). Thus, the issues of convergence and using multimedia tools have acquired particular importance for all types of media. As François Pellissier, executive president of TF1 advertising division, told Les Echos newspaper, “in TF1, it was customary to say ‘content is king’. Today we have to add “media is content with tech and data” because even great content is not enough if we don’t integrate the concepts of use that technology and data are revolutionizing” (Le Bolzer 2020). Today media have to integrate different kinds of use, so that any the program is approachable at any time, then distributed in different environments. They must scale their offerings accordingly and measure the overall performance of each content in all possible modes of operation. For media consumers in the Internet environment, traditional principles of media production have long ceased to exist. There is a fast-growing demand for content targeting, consumption of complex media stories with multi-level and multi-platform representations. As Robert Schumann Foundation experts underlined in 2020, “telecommunications networks, communications services and media play an important role in ensuring economic and social sustainability. They provide the tools needed to virtualize work . . . More than ever, the transformative nature of digital innovation in the media and telecommunications industries is affecting the way we live and work” (Pogorel and Preta 2020). Speaking of convergence, which has undoubtedly accelerated in the media sector, one cannot but talk about the innovations that print publications use in order to survive and achieve success in very difficult conditions summoned by both the general trend for digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in 2020, the American Washington Post distinguished itself with a whole set of specific innovations, actively and successfully increasing the number of subscribers outside the United States. The WP subscription business has grown by 40% since the beginning of 2020 compared to 2019 (in this volume, the growth of foreign subscribers accounted for 10% of the total increase). Mickey King, WP Marketing Director underlined that the regional approach has been a major factor in this success since WP differentiated its policy and subscription prices depending on the region, taking into account its peculiarities. To achieve this, developers are removing barriers to subscribing in other regions, such as currency selection. Partnerships with other publishers also underpin WP’s success. WP collaborates with the Financial Times to reciprocally promote subscriptions to boost subscriber growth in the UK. In addition, in 2020, WP introduced The Signal contextual targeting system that helps advertisers to target ads within articles, as well as to select the most appropriate material based on user behavior. Chinese print media also use innovations to increase traffic and thus to strengthen positions in the market. Experts identify several areas of innovation practiced by Chinese publishers. Firstly, this is the aforementioned cooperation with popular commercial sites. For example, the job advertisements and employment site 51job.com cooperates with 20 newspapers, in particular with the newspaper Nanfang Dushibao. 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