Economic Sustainability of News Media in the Age of AI: A Bibliometric and Topic-Modeling Map of Business Model Research

The economic viability of news organizations underpins public access to information, yet media sustainability research has mostly asked how the media report on sustainability, not whether news media can themselves be sustained. We map how the economic sustainability of news media is conceptualized in 518 Web of Science and Scopus publications (1987–2026), retrieved through a keyword search and a targeted search of three core media-economics journals, combining bibliometric indicators, NMF topic–modeling and cosine mapping onto five a priori dimensions. The field has grown by 11.5% per year over the last decade, is anchored in media-economics and media-management journals and remains nationally fragmented (16.4% international co–authorship). Its mapped core is economic and institutional: platform dependency (39%), the economic value of news (14%) and revenue models (11%), with business models as the most central theme and 31% of the corpus unmapped. The social pillar is weak: neither journalistic labor nor audience relationships emerged as a topic, and audience vocabulary was absorbed by a broad platform-related topic. AI-related research shows no statistically significant concentration in any dimension (Cramér’s V = 0.09); its share reached 33% in 2025, and an exploratory projection points to about 41% by 2029, although the post-2020 trend is not statistically significant.