Denmark
The Danish media market has two strong public broadcasters (DR and TV2) and several successful commercial news brands, which also receive public subsidies. Commercial news organisations are facing falls in print subscriptions and advertising revenue following loss of online traffic from social media and increasingly AI-driven search engines. Responses include cost-cutting, redundancies, bundling initiatives, and subscription price increases.
Following Norwegian conglomerate Amedia’s acquisition of the Berlingske news organisation in 2025 and their partial acquisition of the regional news organisation JFM, these partners are hoping to increase payment levels by duplicating Amedia’s Norwegian bundling schemes, launching new subscription packages ‘before the summer’. With reduced editorial staff, Berlingske’s tabloid BT appears to have recovered from the economic setbacks which led to the closure of its print edition in 2023.
Jutland-based national newspaper Jyllands-Posten has introduced a multi-layered subscription package which matches different user needs for flexible news products with differentiated payment models across online, print, and audio.
In 2025, new inter-Nordic collaborations saw the light of day, as Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier acquired a majority-share of the successful digital challenger Zetland, which itself had already established spin-off publications, Demo in Norway and Uusi Juttu in Finland.
The Danish Competition Authority has approved JP/Politiken’s acquisition of Alrow Media, which runs Altinget, a key online provider of political news. The first AI-related casualty of the news industry in Denmark was the sacking of all staff at the digital news provider Avisen.dk (4% reach), who attributed a 70% drop in referral traffic to the combined impact of an Apple update in the spring – which slowed loading of their site – and the subsequent launch of Google AI Overviews.1 It appears that the impact was greatest on their popular ‘evergreen’ content.
On a more positive note, DR used AI during the 2025 local elections to translate live radio reports from its regional districts into text on its regional websites, with content tailored to specific election constituencies.
The news creator scene in Denmark appears to be picking up speed after a slow start. Launching Frede’s Frontpage with ultra-short videos on Instagram and TikTok in 2022, journalist Frede Dyrnesli targets a young demographic by putting a face to the news, with a mission to ‘not lose them to AI and brainrot’.
In response, some established publishers are now trying to build stronger personality-based connections with younger audiences. For instance, regional TV2-station Kosmopol has launched ‘Aburna’s Boat’ on Instagram and TikTok, where a journalist invites politicians, celebrities, and opinion-leaders for chatty interviews on her rowing boat on the lakes of Central Copenhagen.
The governing coalition agreed to set up a media ombudsman, with the main task of monitoring alternative media actors such as influencers, bloggers, and podcasters, who are currently operating outside the media accountability system based on the Press Council. Details of how this will be done are unclear, but the ombudsman has powers to act in response to complaints about libel and slander in alternative media content.
National dailies Berlingske and Politiken are investing heavily in vertical video, not just as a supplement to text-based news, but as journalistic content in its own right, for distribution on their own sites without paywalls and on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, in an attempt to win young audiences.
DR’s new Director-General Bjarne Corydon (former Social Democratic Finance Minister) is implementing wide-ranging strategic initiatives, including a structure where the news division no longer has its own CEO; plans to boost DR’s presence on social platforms to appeal to hard-to-reach audiences; and the launch of a BBC-inspired initiative ‘DR Verify’ to boost fact-checking and combat misinformation. These were seen as defensive measures prior to a planned overhaul of media policy which was postponed once a general election was called for 24 April. The package is likely to revise the framework of national and regional PSBs and reform subsidy schemes for private news media.
State subsidies, currently totalling €51m p.a., are awarded to ‘publicistic media’, that is, commercial companies meeting a 50% threshold of news covering politics, society, and culture. Smaller funds aim to support innovation initiatives (€5m p.a.), going mostly to digital news startups (like Zetland) and struggling free local weeklies (€7m p.a.).
Unlike some other countries, where news organisations are seeking individual deals with tech and AI platforms, Danish publishers are continuing to work together to combat big tech’s use of news organisations’ copyrighted content and data archives for AI training purposes. After deadlocked talks with Meta, Google, and Open AI, the publishers took OpenAI to court in February 2026.
Kim Christian Schrøder, Mark Blach-Ørsten, and Mads Kæmsgaard Eberholst
Roskilde University, Denmark
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Usage levels for different sources of news are mostly stable year-on-year. Online sources are used by more than 80%, with television used by 61%, and print sources unchanged at 14%.
Pay for online news
20%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
34%
(+7)
Trust in news overall
55%
(-1)
Global average: 37%
Since 2021, when trust in Danish news media peaked at 59%, there has been a small decline, leaving trust at a still high 55%. Most trusted are the national and regional public service news media as well as national and local legacy news media. Least trusted are the two national Danish tabloids.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
4/180
Score 88.47
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
