In May 2026, we ran a survey on European publishers’ app strategy and digital transition. Here’s what 65 European newspaper publishers told us about the gap between wanting a digital future and having a plan to reach it.
Agreeing on digital is the easy part
Across our recent survey of 65 European newspaper publishers, the future of news is not really in dispute: digital is where the business is going. Publishers differ on the specifics (e.g., building toward an all-in subscription bundle, a strong digital edition or a live-news product), but almost none are betting on print as the destination.
That said, wanting a digital future and working toward one turn out to be very different things. While 29% of the publishers we surveyed described migrating their print subscribers to digital as a top strategic priority, 22% of those who have print subscribers said they aren’t actively migrating them at all. Yet, these same publishers, asked where they ultimately want their readers to end up, point firmly at digital products.
So, almost everyone shares the destination, in one form or another. The gap the survey identified isn’t about vision, but rather in the execution of how publishers are actually moving toward the future they say they believe in.
In defence of going slow
Holding on to print is a defensible position on today’s numbers: print still accounts for roughly two-thirds of global publisher revenue. Protecting a revenue source that size is not irrational.
The publishers taking their time often have considered reasons. Some run what amounts to a just-in-time model, keeping print subscribers where they are until the moment they’re at risk. As one Nordic regional publisher put it: “We keep our print subscribers alive as long as possible but are ready to move them to digital if they are about to leave us.”
Others face genuine structural constraints. A Southern European national shared: “We need print subscribers due to the system of public aids to editors.” For them, converting print readers would mean forfeiting state support.
These are not publishers asleep at the wheel. The question is whether those reasons still hold as well tomorrow as they do today.
Why waiting costs more than it looks
Three forces make a wait-and-see approach riskier than it sounds.
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The first is that the longer a reader stays on print, the harder they are to move.
Print subscribers have built a daily habit around the physical paper, and that habit is precisely what makes them resistant to digital products — a point INMA has made repeatedly about the difficulty of activating long-standing print readers. Migration doesn’t get easier the longer you wait; it gets harder, because you’re working against a habit that deepens with every passing year.
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The second is that the just-in-time model quietly assumes a capability most publishers don’t have.
“We’ll move them when they’re about to leave” only works if you can see them about to leave, which means churn signals and a digital product ready to catch the reader at exactly the right moment.
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The third is that the decision may not stay on your timeline. Print economics (i.e., paper, distribution, aging presses) are deteriorating independently of any publisher’s strategy, and some have already been forced to pull print from certain regions on cost grounds alone.
A publisher who hasn’t migrated proactively risks having to do it reactively when the print costs forces the issue rather than when the digital product is ready.
Put those together and print starts to look less like a stable asset you can manage down at leisure, and more like a melting one that’s declining on its own clock whether or not you act.
Vision is cheap. Execution isn’t.
Which brings us back to the gap we started with. If nearly every publisher now agrees on the direction, vision is no longer what separates the successful ones from the rest. Execution is.
That was the central lesson of this year’s Reuters Institute trends report, which we wrote about in January: when news leaders were asked to name the biggest barriers to innovation, the answers pointed inward (resources, skills, and organisational culture, not at the market). As we put it then, the biggest differentiator may not be vision, but leadership’s ability to translate ambition into action.
If this sounds familiar, you’re in good company
If you’re reading this with a nagging sense that you’re not moving fast enough, our survey shows that you’re not alone.
As the book How Big Things Get Done (which I can very highly recommend!) puts it, almost nothing is ever truly done for the first time. The instinct to treat your transition as unique is exactly the instinct that makes it harder than it needs to be, because it blinds you to everyone who has already done something close to it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you can almost certainly already find people who have built one.
And the good news is that in this industry, that’s very much possible: Go to the events (the Digital Growth Summit being an obvious plug), reach out to 2 people on LinkedIn who do your job at a different company, follow the publications and research that surface case studies (and if you’ve read this far, you’re already doing it!). What’s so valuable about news publishing is that we’re so often not in direct competition with one another, which means best practices actually get shared rather than guarded.
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