Finland
The Finnish news market is characterised by strong public service media, a widespread tradition of regional and local newspaper subscription, and a small, widely read group of national newspapers. Only one commercial television channel broadcasts news, with commercial radio news produced by affiliated newspapers, the national news agency, or commercial TV.
The past year can be characterised as a year of nascent stabilisation. The public service media company, Yle, began applying the expenditure cuts imposed on it in 2024 and has so far closed 309 posts (10% of the workforce). More cuts are expected in the future. The Finnish national news agency, STT, faced an existential crisis when the country’s largest publisher, the Sanoma group (owner of titles such as Helsingin Sanomat, Ilta-Sanomat, and Aamulehti), ended their subscription. STT has survived for now by reducing the editorial workforce by over 25%, while its owners wait for a promised government emergency rescue package. Three major news media companies, Sanoma Media Finland, Alma Media, and Keskisuomalainen (which account for the bulk of Finnish newspapers’ turnover, circulation, and titles), all reported increased profits for 2025. Schibsted of Norway acquired Finland’s largest commercial television company, MTV, from Telia, a Nordic mobile operator, and many are expecting further Nordic cross-border consolidation or partnerships soon. Two complaints regarding state aid to Yle – originally filed in 2021 and 2024 – are still awaiting resolution by the European Commission and the European Union’s General Court. Meanwhile, Yle has reached out to commercial media by offering more collaboration, for example in technology sharing.
The digital journalism outlet, Uusi Juttu, was launched with much fanfare in January 2025. Its selling point is in-depth journalism with a focus on audio, and it is entirely supported by subscriptions. Majority-owned by Danish Zetland (itself later acquired by the Swedish Bonnier News), Uusi Juttu signed up an impressive 12,000 paying subscribers before launch, reaching 25,000 and reportedly becoming profitable by the end of its first year. Another digital-only startup, Asiastudio, focusing on video podcast content, was launched in July 2025, with a business model based on a mix of subscriptions and advertising. Such grassroots news media development is rare in Finland and establishing new outlets is therefore noteworthy. News creators are yet to enter the mainstream, while some creators cover news but often without much of a journalistic ethos. For example, one of Finland’s leading podcasts, Sijoituskästi, has around 200,000 listeners per episode and aims to become the country’s ‘largest business media’, but insists its content is not journalism.
The move to a largely digital business model is progressing slowly. The most recent data, from 2024, show that the proportion of newspapers’ digital revenues is increasing, nearing one-third, and the relative weight of the ten best-performing media in total digital revenue is decreasing. In other words: smaller media companies are catching up on digital transition. Newspaper companies are generally compensating for declining print and advertising revenue by cutting costs and selling more digital subscriptions. Our survey data show 23% of Finnish respondents had paid for online news in the last year.
The Finnish parliament voted in 2025 to end the state monopoly over gambling and lift restrictions on related advertising from 2027. The new companies are expected to spend €150–300m p.a. on advertising, with much of it likely to go to the media sector. Since the total value of the Finnish media advertising market is €1.3bn, the likely increase is significant. Media companies are preparing for an initial advertising bonanza, especially around sports. They have begun preparing for 2027 by investing more in sports coverage and, at least in one case, launching an entirely new sports-focused online news product (Vuohi).
The use of generative AI has proliferated rapidly in Finnish newsrooms, with major media companies already using it for behind-the-scenes applications. Its use is also expanding into audience-facing applications like AI-voiced newscasts and news-brand-specific chatbots. One commercial radio station, JR Puhe, has aired fully AI-generated talk radio programmes since 2023. In 2025, Yle developed an investigative AI tool to scan municipal documents for news. A Finnish startup called Freepress also launched its product in September 2025, offering AI-generated news summaries based on aggregating content from other news websites. Freepress claims to be negotiating licensing deals with legacy media companies, but industry representatives have criticised it for what they argue is illegal use of copyrighted content.1
Ville Manninen and Mikko Villi
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
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
Print continues to decline – by 20pp since 2018 – but use of TV for news has only declined by 9pp in the same period and is still used by a majority on a weekly basis.
Pay for online news
23%
(+2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
31%
(+4)
Trust in news overall
63%
(-4)
Global average: 37%
Finns’ trust in news has continued to decline since the 2021–4 boost. This marks a return to a global, downward trend. However, Finns’ trust in news remains among the highest recorded in any of the surveyed countries. At the brand level, broadcasters Yle, MTV, local newspapers, and the business newspaper Kauppalehti are among the most trusted.
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
6/180
Score 86.22
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
