A new Nordicom report brings together fragmented knowledge on the role of journalism and news media in the Nordic countries, offering a rare comparative overview at a time when global platforms increasingly shape national media systems.
Journalism and news media remain central to democracy across the Nordic countries. At the same time, the conditions under which independent journalism operates are changing rapidly – shaped by economic pressure, political tensions, and an accelerating digital transformation. According to Jonas Ohlsson, director of Nordicom and one of the authors of the report, Nordic News Media Landscapes 2025, these shifts make shared, empirically grounded knowledge more important than ever.
“Nordicom, as a scientifically grounded expert organisation on media development in the Nordic region, has an important role to play here. This report is intended as a contribution to the joint building of knowledge on the role and conditions of professional news journalism in the Nordic countries”, says Ohlsson.
Rather than introducing new datasets, the report identifies, systematises, and translates existing knowledge that is often scattered across countries, institutions, and languages. The aim is to make journalism’s role and conditions comparable across the five Nordic countries – something that is currently far from straightforward.
Less Transparency
While Nordic media research produces a great deal of insight, Ohlsson points out that the state of knowledge varies significantly between the different Nordic countries. Research has become more specialised, while broader overviews of structural conditions are harder to come by. At the same time, publicly funded media statistics have become less comprehensive, and media companies share less data than before.
“Even Nordic media companies have increasingly adopted the non-transparent attitude that characterises the large American players”, he notes.
As a result, it has become more difficult to assess similarities and differences within the region, or to position the Nordic countries in a global context. Comparative efforts at the EU level only partly fill the gap, as they exclude Norway and Iceland, with Iceland often falling outside international comparisons altogether.
Nordic Strengths and Vulnerabilities
Despite these challenges, the report highlights several shared features of the Nordic media landscape: strong public service media, continued local news provision, digitally advanced audiences, and comparatively high levels of trust and digital news consumption. Yet, some important differences remain, says Tobias Lindberg, media researcher and one of the authors of the report.
“In the Scandinavian countries, direct media subsidies are much more extensive than in Finland and Iceland”, he explains. “We also see higher willingness to pay for digital news in Norway and Sweden”.
Ownership structures further underline both strength and vulnerability. Nordic news media are still largely owned by Nordic actors, even as cross-border ownership within the region has increased. This stands in sharp contrast to social media platforms and streaming services, which are predominantly owned by US-based companies.
“Those platforms focus on entertainment rather than journalism”, Lindberg says. “And their growing role in news distribution creates new dependencies”.
Comparative Perspectives
A key contribution of the report is its comparative Nordic perspective. Comparing countries makes it easier to understand national developments in context and to see patterns that are not visible from within a single media system. But such comparisons are often limited by language barriers, as national media reports and policy documents are rarely translated into English.
One of the report’s key contributions, Ohlsson concludes, lies in making knowledge travel across borders.
“We’ve decoded and made valuable information accessible across language boundaries”, he says. “That’s a necessary step if we want to understand Nordic journalism as a region, not just as five separate national systems”.
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Nordic News Media Landscapes 2025
