This article explores three national news agencies in Europe (Press Association Group in the United Kingdom, Austria Presse Agentur in Austria and Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå in Sweden) in order to find the reasons why these agencies decided to transform themselves from traditional newswires into diversified media businesses. We ask why these agencies are able to operate under market principles, with substantial profit margins, and also to contribute to a sustainable national media system, while agencies in some other countries struggle. We draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 senior managers of the agencies and use several strategic management frameworks, including five forces and dynamic capabilities. We find that, in all three agencies, early crises led to a sensing of news agencies’ weakened bargaining power with media clients and the decline of industry attractiveness and triggered a timely search for new revenue sources through diversification. These successful new businesses are based on a strong news-agency brand, on technological capabilities, and on resources originating from the agencies’ firm relationship with the news media. We argue that, in all three cases, visionary leadership and an ability to orchestrate a new relationship with media owners have been key capabilities created in these early crises.

Digital platforms have disrupted traditional news organizations, with new platform-based models gaining ground. However, the incumbents can defend their positions and reap the benefits of multisided market structures by establishing a platform business model themselves. We examine a case study of the Austrian News Agency (APA), which gradually formulated a strategy that resulted in a platform-based business model. Platform features were strategized and innovated over time and in phases, with the intent of creating value for customers on both sides of the platform. We found that APA's platform transformation was enabled by a visionary value proposition backed by a trusted institution's legitimacy and a co-operative organizational model that provided added incentives for the participating news media companies. The strategy and the business model emerged on the basis of external developments and internal realizations concerning the feasibility of the new platform strategy. Based on our results, we develop a framework for an incumbent strategy formation process towards a platform business model. This framework demonstrates the incumbent organization's emergent, as well as deliberate, strategic ability to introduce platform features into its business model, based on unique intra-firm synergies with established parts of the business, and highlighting a potential for "incumbent advantage."

Traditional recommendation systems have limited possibilities to optimise business value in editorial decision making in news production, as they select the recommendations only from the content whose production has been decided editorially in the daily news process or content from existing content inventories. This paper explores an approach to use predictive analytics to make it possible to optimise story assignment and editing in daily editorial work based on selected business objectives already before publishing. In this case study exploration, we use the 'constructive approach' as a method to provide solutions to concrete business problems with a scientific approach. We contribute by experimenting a novel method combining elements from several scientific domains like strategic management and system dynamics. We conclude that with language analysis using recurrent neural networks, we were able to predict the success of a news story published on a digital channel in a way that fulfils the 'weak market test' criteria of the constructive approach. A company with whom the model was developed considered it valuable enough to decide to move it from exploration to be further developed and used in real news production.

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