Sweden
Sweden is marked by its combination of public service media (PSM) and commercial news publishers, both sectors being active in digital publishing. High levels of connectivity and subscription uptake support a resilient market, even as advertising revenues decline and publishers’ experiment with AI, audio, and other formats to reach and engage their audiences.
Sweden’s media system remains comparatively stable but it is shaped by long-term structural pressures and a rapid pace of digital innovation. Public service media (PSM) – Swedish Television (SVT), Swedish Radio (SR), and Utbildningsradion (UR)1 – continue to enjoy high reach and play a central role for national and local news online. Both SVT and SR prioritise distribution through their own digital platforms, while SVT especially has been taking a more selective approach to third-party platforms in order to retain editorial control and limit platform dependence.
Alongside PSM, Sweden has a well-established commercial news sector dominated by a small number of large conglomerates, combined with a dense network of local and regional titles. Media ownership is relatively concentrated, dominated by the Bonnier Group, which owns national titles such as Dagens Nyheter and Expressen as well as 40 local newspapers, and by Schibsted Media, which owns Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Omni, and E24 in Sweden (and multiple titles in Norway). While concentration of ownership has been taking place, this is partially offset by a longstanding system of state press subsidies designed to support plurality, particularly outside major metropolitan areas. These subsidies remain politically supported, although their design and effectiveness continue to be debated.
News consumption in Sweden is overwhelmingly digital. In 2026, 87% of respondents used online sources for news in the past week, compared with 61% for television and just 20% for print. Over the past decade, print’s role has roughly halved, while online news use has remained consistently high. Social media is used by 47% for news on a weekly basis, and 7% are now using AI chatbots for news, up from 3% last year.
Advertising revenues for Swedish news publishers have been in decline for many years, reflecting both the structural shift away from print and strong competition from global technology companies. The morning press’s combined advertising revenues from websites, apps, and printed newspapers fell by 1% to SEK 2,337.4m (€213m) in 2025, compared with SEK 2,364.2m (€216m) in 2024. This suggests that 2025 is the year that advertising revenue declines finally levelled off, thanks to growth in online advertising.2 Moreover, Swedish news publishers have continued to focus on reader revenue. In 2026, 32% of respondents in Sweden reported paying for online news, placing the country among the highest-paying markets internationally. Industry figures indicate that reader revenues increased by 2% on a year-on-year basis.3 News publishers, particularly those within the Bonnier Group and Schibsted Media, continue to refine bundled subscription models that combine national and local news, lifestyle journalism, and premium features. Bonnier News achieved record reader revenue in 2025, driven by its +Allt bundle reaching more than one million subscribers. They have integrated national dailies like Dagens Nyheter with 40+ local titles and Readly’s magazines.
Audio and video formats remain strategic growth areas, with news podcasts reaching 11% of the population weekly. Short-form and explanatory formats are increasingly used to attract younger audiences. Artificial intelligence plays a growing role in newsroom workflows. In 2025, several Swedish news publishers moved towards deep newsroom integration of generative AI, embedding tools for summarisation, transcription, analysis, and audience interaction into everyday editorial work, while emphasising human editorial oversight. They are adopting a similar approach in their stances towards AI companies, combining selective partnerships (e.g. content deals) with a firm defence of copyright, editorial control, and independence. In 2025, Swedish Radio and Aftonbladet both launched their own AI-driven news chatbots, signalling a shift towards conversational, question-based news access while keeping content tightly anchored in each publisher’s own journalism. AI-enabled large-scale automation of production is being adopted by some companies, notably at Bonnier News, which uses automated print layout and workflow systems.
Oscar Westlund
Oslo Metropolitan University
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
News use in Sweden is dominated by online news access, while print continues a long-term decline. Television remains a resilient news source, driven mainly by the continued popularity of public service media.
Pay for online news
32%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
30%
(+4)
Trust in news overall
52%
(-1)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news remains comparatively high in Sweden. In 2026, overall news trust stood at 52%, ranking Sweden sixth among 48 markets surveyed. Public service media and local newspapers continue to attract the highest trust, while alternative news media and partisan outlets are trusted by significantly fewer people.
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
5/180
Score 87.61
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 UR is the public service educational broadcaster providing programming to SVT and SR and with their own streaming service UR play.
2 https://tu.se/pressmeddelanden/morgonpressens-digitala-annonsaffar-okade-kraftigt-2025/
3 https://tu.se/mediefakta/annonsbarometern/lasarintakterna-okade-med-2-procent-under-2025/