From Print to Platform: Digital Transformation in News Media Business Models

The news media industry has undergone one of the most sustained business model disruptions of any sector in the digital economy, as advertising revenue has migrated to platform intermediaries, audiences have fragmented across social and video platforms, and generative artificial intelligence has begun to reshape both news production and news discovery. This paper presents a systematic, thematically organized review of academic and high-quality industry literature on the digital transformation of news media business models, published or released primarily between 2014 and 2026. Following a PRISMA-inspired identification, screening, and eligibility process, 48 sources were retained for thematic synthesis, spanning peer-reviewed communication and media-management scholarship, and authoritative industry and statistical sources including the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, the Pew Research Center, Statistics Canada, and Press Gazette's journalism job-cuts tracker. The review identifies five interlocking themes: the structural collapse of advertising-based revenue models; the rise, and subsequent plateauing, of reader-revenue and subscription models; growing platform dependency and algorithmic distribution risk; sustained newsroom restructuring and employment contraction; and the accelerating, ambivalent integration of artificial intelligence into news production and distribution. Drawing on this synthesis, the paper proposes a five-stage conceptual model from print-centric models through digitization, platformization, the reader-revenue pivot, to the AI-augmented newsroom that situates these themes within a single explanatory framework. The paper closes with theoretical and practical implications for media managers, journalism educators, and policymakers, and identifies priority directions for future research, including the long-term sustainability of reader-revenue models and the net effect of generative AI on public trust in journalism. Keywords: digital transformation; artificial intelligence; Systematic Review; news media; business models; platformization; journalism economics; paywalls; media management