The Danish media market has two strong public broadcasters (DR and TV2) and several successful commercial brands, which receive an annual public subsidy. Commercial news organisations are facing increased newsprint costs, declines in print subscribers and advertising revenue, growing inflation, and increased wages after a March 2024 deal with unions. Company responses involve cost-cutting and redundancies.

The growing financial pressures on commercial media have led to a ‘cascade of cutbacks’ (Mediawatch) in the past year,¹ often accompanied by industrial action from journalists. TV and print advertising revenues dropped 16% in 2023 and small increases in advertising on media companies’ digital services did not make up for this decline. Decreasing traffic from social media is being met with plans for differentiated pay models, including those involving bundling different services. In the TV market, TV2 faced 65 layoffs. After going online-only in 2023, the tabloid BT is losing revenue and users.

In the newspaper market, regional and local media in particular suffered considerable losses in 2023. One regional news organisation will phase out print newspapers by 2027, while others are considering less-than-daily editions and increased subscription prices. Some regional/local conglomerates have merged local free weekly titles, and stopped home delivery, relying solely on distribution at shopping centres and transport hubs. Weekly magazine publishers will be closing some print titles in 2024.

Most commercial news websites – except the tabloid BT which relies solely on advertising – have paywalls with only limited content freely available, and our 2024 survey reports a relatively high rate of paying for news online (17%). Digital subscription prices in Denmark are quite high but many people don’t pay the full price. Public and commercial media are intensifying efforts to get users to log in and provide first-party data. Those reliant on commercial revenues hope this will improve cross-pollination between free and paid content and attract increased advertising revenues.

All Danish news organisations are investing heavily in generative AI tools and are gradually implementing them in daily news operations. In early 2024, JP/Politiken launched an in-house repository of trusted content from its three titles that can be used to drive AI experimentation, including assisting journalists with interview transcription, news text and headline generation, and in time voice clone and photo generation functions. All news organisations are experimenting with recommendation algorithms that also recognise the democratic functions of news. In February 2024, Jyllands-Posten launched a new personalising frontpage algorithm, that tries to combine user preferences with an additional journalistic weighting score designed to avoid echo-chamber type effects. In late 2023 an updated version of the Danish rules on press ethics was produced which now specifically covers material that has been partly or wholly created using AI.²

Publishers are continuing their efforts to combat big tech’s exploitation of news organisations’ copyrighted content and data archives for AI-model training purposes. After collective negotiations with tech giants, an agreement was landed with Microsoft and Google. But Meta, Apple, and TikTok have declined participation in state-mandated conciliation talks.

An overhaul of the system of state subsidies, which sought to increase platform neutrality between print and online news media, achieved political consensus. These subsidies, totalling around €55m, are awarded to ‘publicistic media’, i.e., commercial companies meeting a 50% threshold of news covering politics, society, and culture. National news organisations were concerned because the deal redirects subsidies from national to local and regional news organisations and reduces subsidies to companies owning several titles. But the intention behind these changes is to reverse the trend towards increasing numbers of local news deserts.

The streaming market is heavily dominated by evenly balanced competitors TV2 Play, Netflix, and DR-TV. Recent research from DR shows that in the general TV market, live viewing continues to decline slowly, with streaming growing steadily.

Although declining, Facebook is still the leading form of social media for news in Denmark (32%), even among the young 18–24 (34%), with Instagram (19%) and TikTok (15%) following. With TikTok, news organisations are divided about how to balance reaching the young against risks of Chinese data leaks/surveillance, with Ekstra Bladet and Zetland continuing use of the platform.

Although consumption levels plateaued in 2023, podcasting is continuing its march towards mass media status as new providers mushroomed among established news media and startups. Market leader DR started removing its podcasts from commercial third-party platforms in order to focus listening through its own audio platform but suffered some (forecast to be temporary) losses in podcast reach. Traditional radio listening dropped by 9% in 2023.

Kim Christian Schrøder, Mark Blach-Ørsten, and Mads Kæmsgaard Eberholst
Roskilde University, Denmark

General trust in news media has remained pretty stable over the last decade. In 2023 there were several public debates with criticism of news media, over alleged pro-Israel coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and a plagiarism case at a national newspaper. Neither seems to have affected general trust or trust in the largest and most trusted brands, DR and TV2.

Footnotes