News and Information a Barbell Industry

I was looking through the State of the News Media annual report and ran across this interesting bit of data:

“… 80% of the traffic to news and information sites is concentrated at the top 7% of sites. The vast majority of the top news sites (67%), moreover, are still tied to legacy media …”

There are, of course, millions of small news and information sites (including this one) that share the other 20%. 

News, like almost every other industry we’ve looked at, is a barbell industry.  By this we mean an industrial structure with a few giant corporations on one end, a narrow middle consisting of a shrinking number of mid-sized firms and a large and growing number of small, micro and even one person firms on the other end.

Our Industry Structure category has a lot of posts on barbell industries.