Nordic News Media Landscapes 2025
This report will be available for purchase as a printed publication in early March.
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.
Nordic news media are not insulated from these global structural shifts.
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 has been compiled and written by a project team at Nordicom and builds on Nordicom’s long-standing experience of documenting, analysing, and communicating developments in the Nordic media systems.
Contents
- Section 1. Introduction
- A model for analysing media structures
- Data sources and delimitations
- Structure of the report
- Section 2. The Nordic countries
- Democracy and freedom of the press
- Economic development
- Political development
- Digital infrastructure
- Summary
- Section 3. The Nordic populations
- Demographic development
- Socioeconomic development
- Urban-rural divides
- Digital maturity
- Summary
- Section 4. Nordic news media policies
- Public service news
- Direct subsidies to private news media
- Indirect subsidies to private news media
- Summary
- Section 5. The Nordic advertising markets
- Data availability on the Nordic advertising markets
- Total advertising investments
- Advertising in different formats
- Summary
- Section 6. The Nordic news media audiences
- Interests in news
- Trust in news
- Access to paid-for news online
- Reach of different news sources
- News avoiders
- Summary
- Section 7. The structure of the Nordic news media markets
- Market characteristics and key actors
- The biggest media owners
- The biggest media outlets
- Summary
- Section 8. Summary and takeaways
- Background, purpose, scope, and data
- Shared Nordic patterns and structural dynamics
- National profiles and distinctions
- Five key takeaways
