At a crossroads: Journalism and entrepreneurship in the Balkans

In the past decade, many have debated over the future of news journalism, the decline of print and the imminent rise of online media. In fact, hardly anyone would deny that the Internet has brought about fundamental changes to media markets around the world, including in the rather small, yet culturally diverse Balkan region. With increasing competition, established news outlets in the region have been struggling to innovate fast enough to keep their revenues from dropping, and many media newcomers have faced the hard task of creating sustainable business models from scratch. As a result, media professionals in the Balkans have identified the need to become more opportunistic and entrepreneurial, while preserving the journalistic integrity of their work. At the heart of entrepreneurship is the ability to generate unique customer value. With ongoing challenges to their independence as well as the small and fragmented markets unable to fully support their operations, online news media in the Balkans are in need to create unique value and stand out from their competition in order to make it in the long run. The current study takes a qualitative approach to investigate the extent to which digital news publications in the Balkans are being entrepreneurial in their strife to produce sustainable and independent journalism. Derived from eleven semi-structured expert interviews, the results indicate that although the level of entrepreneurship is still quite low, journalists and media owners in the Balkans are starting to understand the new dynamics of the media market and the role that the Internet plays in it. Many have already taken the first step of embracing technology and updating much of the value that they have traditionally been offering to their audiences, yet what is still needed to create entirely new propositions from the bottom up.