Measured by revenue in 2023, the four largest newspaper companies in the Nordic region hailed from four different countries. The largest entity, with a revenue equivalent to 853 million euros, was the family-owned Swedish media group’s news division: Bonnier News. In the Nordic region, Bonnier News published newspapers in large parts of Sweden, southern and western Finland, and the Danish capital region. The listed companies Schibsted in Norway and Sanoma in Finland – Schibsted News Media and Sanoma Media Finland – ranked as the second and third largest, respectively. The fourth largest was the foundation-owned Danish company JP/Politikens Hus.
Examining all the companies on the list of the largest newspaper firms, they were relatively evenly distributed among the four major Nordic countries. Norway and Sweden were represented by three companies each, while Denmark and Finland had two each. The Icelandic newspaper market is generally too small for any of its companies to make it onto this top-list. This year was no exception to that rule.
In three instances, the newspaper operations on the top-list formed a business area within a larger corporate group. These were Bonnier, Sanoma, and Schibsted. Each of these had significant operations both within and outside the broader media market. In the remaining seven companies, newspaper publishing and related activities were the primary sources of revenue. The largest newspaper company in terms of the number of individual newspaper titles was the Norwegian firm Amedia, which published 107 titles. The majority of these were local morning papers.
Regarding ownership forms, four of the ten companies were publicly listed and traded. Among the remaining companies, five were majority-owned by non-profit foundations. Foundations were also the largest single shareholders in two of the listed companies: Sanoma (the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation) and Schibsted (the Tinius Trust). In 2024, Schibsted was divided into two parts. One part, Schibsted Marketplaces (later renamed Vend), consolidated market services like Blocket and Finn, while the other part, Schibsted Media, consolidated media such as morning and evening newspapers. The media division of the company was wholly acquired by the Tinius Trust and delisted from the stock exchange. The other part, with its marketplaces, continued as a listed company. In early 2025, the media division acquired the television companies TV4 in Sweden and MTV in Finland from Telia Company.
The relatively significant presence of foundations as owners of large newspaper companies is a hallmark of the Nordic newspaper markets from a European perspective. At the same time, only one of the ten largest newspaper companies in 2023 remained under family control. Historically, family-owned companies have been a common form of ownership in the newspaper industry in the Nordic region. The remaining company is Bonnier News, which is part of the family-owned Bonnier Group.
Despite the trend of increasing internationalisation of the Western world’s media markets in recent decades, foreign ownership interests in the Nordic newspaper markets have been relatively limited. Nevertheless, this has changed in recent years. In 2023, three of the ten largest newspaper companies had majority ownership in newspaper businesses in another Nordic country. One of these was Schibsted, which has owned the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet since the 1990s. The second was the Norwegian company Polaris Media – with Schibsted as the largest single shareholder – which was the majority owner of the Gothenburg-based company Stampen. Polaris entered the Swedish newspaper market in 2019. The third was the Swedish company Bonnier, which owns most of the Danish business newspaper Børsen. Bonnier also acquired a majority stake in the company around Hufvudstadsbladet in 2023, and the following year in the company around Vasabladet, both in Finland. At the end of 2024, Amedia also took ownership of the Danish Berlingske Media from the Belgian media company DPG Media. Amedia thus became the owner of, among others, Berlingske, BT, and Weekendavisen – all published in Copenhagen.
Several Nordic newspaper companies held minority interests in newspaper markets outside their own. Examples include JP/Politikens Hus and the aforementioned Amedia. The latter was a minority owner of Bonnier News Local in 2023, a company within the Bonnier Group that publishes more than 40 Swedish local newspapers and several free newspapers. The former, JP/Politiken, owned a smaller share of HD-Sydsvenskan in Helsingborg and Malmö for most of 2023. However, the Danish company sold its share to the majority owner, Bonnier, at the end of the year. A third example is the Swedish local newspaper group NWT Gruppen and its 27 per cent stake in Polaris Media.
Amidst the increasingly competitive landscape for commercial news media, it is noteworthy that six of the ten largest newspaper companies in the Nordic region reported positive operating results in 2023. Conversely, four companies reported negative operating results. However, fewer companies showed a surplus compared with the previous year, and the positive results were weaker. Overall, 2023 was a more challenging economic year for Nordic newspaper companies compared with 2021 and 2022.
Methodological notes
Assembling lists of the largest newspaper companies in a particular geographical area – such as the one presented in this factsheet – is associated with several methodological challenges.
Historically, measures of the size of individual newspaper companies – as well as their respective market shares – have typically built on circulation figures. Since an increasing number of Nordic newspapers have chosen to leave the official circulation auditing services within the national newspaper industries, this kind of comparative analysis is no longer possible for the Nordic region. As a result, we must rely purely on financial data gathered from the annual reports of the companies involved. When assessing the market position of individual newspaper companies in this way, it is important to be aware that the revenue figures presented include the total sales of the individual companies, not just revenue stemming exclusively from newspapers (which are rarely reported separately).
Since few contemporary newspaper publishers are solely dependent on the newspaper business, the figures presented might include revenue from areas such as printing and distribution businesses, magazine and book publishing, and commercial radio. In cases where the newspaper business is organised as an independent division in a larger corporate structure (e.g., Bonnier), we have chosen to present the revenue and profit of the division rather than that of the company. These conditions limit the comparability across companies.
There are also methodological problems regarding the number of individual newspapers controlled by a specific company. There are no independent auditing services listing the total number of newspapers in a systematic manner across the Nordic region. For this reason, and for practical purposes, the number (and classification) of newspapers of the ten publishers listed in this factsheet builds on the self-reported figures of the individual companies. When gathering this data, we have chosen to include newspapers (print and online) devoted to general news coverage, thus excluding themed publications focusing, for instance, on sports, or lifestyle news. In our categorisation of newspaper holdings, we have chosen to distinguish between three types of newspapers: paid-for national newspapers, paid-for local newspapers (including those with a regional scope), and freesheets.
The companies’ revenues in local currencies are converted to euros, which in recent years has led to noticeable currency effects. This particularly affects Norwegian and Swedish companies, as the Norwegian and Swedish krona have lost value relative to the Danish krone and the euro in Finland.