Preface
The market for news media and journalism is undergoing rapid and far-reaching change. Digitalisation and globalisation have fundamentally altered the conditions for producing, distributing, and consuming news. At the same time, news media operate in societies marked by increasing political polarisation, economic uncertainty, more heterogeneous populations, and heightened geopolitical tensions. Together, these developments pose significant challenges for professional journalism and for the democratic functions it is expected to fulfil.
Against this backdrop, the Nordic countries are often described as international role models, historically characterised by strong democratic institutions, high levels of press freedom, widespread news consumption, and well-developed public service media systems. Yet Nordic news media are not insulated from global structural shifts. Commercial revenues – especially from advertising – have increasingly flowed towards global platforms, audience behaviour has become more fragmented, and long-established business models have come under sustained pressure.
The purpose of this report is to describe and compare the markets for news media and their framework conditions in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in 2025. Drawing on an extensive body of independent, publicly available, and quality-assured data, it offers a current, comprehensive, and empirically grounded overview of the Nordic news media sector.
Nordic News Media Landscapes 2025 is published by Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg. The report has been compiled and written by a project team at Nordicom consisting of Jonas Ohlsson, Tobias Lindberg, and Kristin Clay. It builds on Nordicom’s long-standing experience of documenting, analysing, and communicating developments in the Nordic media systems. We hope that the report will be of interest to scholars, journalists, students, industry representatives, and public officials engaged in media policy.
Nordicom is a strategic partner to the Nordic Council of Ministers. An aim of this partnership is to strengthen and advance systematic knowledge about the role and framework conditions of media in the Nordic region. This report is an outcome of that work.
Gothenburg, January 2026
Jonas Ohlsson
Director
Nordicom