Norway
The Norwegian media landscape combines strong national legacy brands with public service media, which have managed the digital transition well. During a year of global turmoil, the news business showed resilience and strength.
After major cuts and redundancies in the previous years, this year seems to suggest a move to greater stability in the Norwegian news market. However, the adoption of AI tools in newsrooms, new actors in the ecosystem in form of content creators, and the consequences this brings for news consumption, particularly amongst young users, pose new challenges to journalism and news media.
In 2025, Schibsted Media bought a Swedish (TV4) and a Finnish (MTV) TV channel from telecoms company Telia, further solidifying its presence across the Nordic region. Schibsted also acquired the remaining minority interest in Podme, the podcast platform in which it had first invested in 2019 and which by March 2026 reported 200,000 paying subscribers. In the domestic market, a major new initiative came from Danish digital-born membership news service Zetland, which aims to launch a Norwegian crowdfunded spin-off in 2026 called Demo.1
Norway remains the market with highest willingness to pay for news, although there was no growth this year. A solid news-reading tradition, an innovative media industry, but also a longstanding press subsidy scheme and the absence of freesheets are central reasons for this high number. Meanwhile, local news conglomerate Amedia made access to their 120 local news titles free to 15–20 year olds, reportedly reaching 20% of the target group by the end of 2025.2 Other national newspapers followed with similar initiatives to attract younger readers, especially in the lead-up to the parliamentary elections.
The 2025 Norwegian parliamentary election presented new challenges for the news media. Social media influencers took on a new importance in Norwegian politics. Political parties spent around 5.4m NOK (€491k) in total on social media advertising and prioritised appearances in podcasts and other social media formats. Prime Minister Støre’s appearance on a popular YouTube channel run by a group of male influencers gained nearly 480,000 views and was shared on TikTok with millions of users. These formats have laid the ground for a new wave of political content creators in Norway.
Norwegian news media have been eager to experiment with AI in journalistic work and news presentation, including personalised front pages and summaries, as well as using AI for investigative work. Schibsted is a pioneer in AI use and has also built in-house tools, e.g. for automation of video production, and made such tools and their source code openly available. Amedia even received an award for their personalised newspaper content at the Digital Media Awards Europe. However, this year also brought some scandals due to misuse of AI, including when the Norwegian News Agency (NTB) published a report on a telecom security threat based on an AI-generated summary full of mistakes. Concerns about AI’s impact on young people’s news consumption peaked during the parliamentary election campaign and all the major political parties signed an agreement not to spread deepfakes and misinformation on social media.
In early 2026, the geopolitical turmoil got closer to home. The Ukraine war continued and US threats against Greenland peaked. But as the latter story faded, a major political and royal scandal developed following investigative journalism into the Epstein files, with a former prime minister and high-ranking diplomats charged with corruption. Meanwhile, close links were revealed between Epstein and the Norwegian Crown Princess – who simultaneously saw her oldest son on trial for alleged rape, domestic abuse, and drug-related crimes.
In media policy, the state budget granted a 3.6% increase in funding for public broadcaster NRK to accommodate price and wage growth. Yet NRK continues to experience cuts in response to digital developments. In early 2026, it announced plans to reduce staffing by cutting 150 full-time posts. Commercial public service broadcaster TV2, which saw a bump in its use and trust level this year, continued lobbying to abolish VAT on video news (other news outlets are exempt from VAT), which was introduced in 2023. In a related development, Vend Marketplaces, the company that now owns Schibsted’s classified ad companies, which until 2024 also owned its news media, got hit by the tax authorities with a VAT claim, potentially as high as €50m, for subscriptions to leading online news site VG. Meanwhile, the major press subsidy scheme has been increased slightly to approximately 440.6m NOK (€39.3m) distributed among 163 newspapers. Well-known fact-checker Faktisk.no also received state support through an initiative to promote digital literacy.
Hallvard Moe and Carolin Schefner
University of Bergen
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
TV and print continue a slow but seemingly steady decline as sources for news, while social media remains steady.
Pay for online news
40%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
39%
(+9)
Trust in news overall
53%
(-1)
Global average: 37%
Trust has stabilised at a higher level post-COVID. In contrast, brand trust levels have risen substantially in recent years, especially for partisan newspaper Klassekampen, tabloid providers VG and Dagbladet, and P4, while NRK remains the most trusted brand.
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
1/180
Score 92.72
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
