Towards competition and collaboration: a mid-range design theory for designing coopetitive news platforms

Newspapers’ digital transformation offers various opportunities and challenges for publishers. While some publishers, such as <i>The New York Times</i>, have been able to monetize their online content, many publishers struggle to sustain revenues. Drawing on the strategic alliance literature, we propose that a coopetitive news platform co-owned and operated by multiple competing publishers for cross-selling online news could resolve this problem. However, we lack theoretically grounded design knowledge for designing such a coopetitive news platform. We conducted a 5-year echeloned design science research (^eDSR) project to address this gap. Through 16 design echelons, we developed a news platform prototype and produced design knowledge for developing it. Our findings offer proof of concept and proof of value for the proposed artefact from users’ and online news publishers’ perspectives. Our contributions to the literature and practice are several. We developed design principles and abductively built a mid-range design theory for designing coopetitive news platforms that loosely couple platform proxies, enabling them to form a coopetition alliance. This, in turn, creates novel opportunities for bundling and cross-selling content from various competing publishers via novel coopetitive subscription plans.