According to the interviews, people working in advertising departments at larger media outlets sometimes talk to journalists in an informal manner, but employees from the advertising departments are never present during editorial meetings. Leading newspapers in Iceland often have special sections dedicated to, for example, travel and leisure, but the content there is not written by journalists, but people who are employed specifically to write for those paid sections.
Meanwhile, in the many smaller media outlets in rural areas, there are a few tools to deal with external influences. They face the daily battles of being in a small close-knit society where a positive outlook prevails and the biggest advertisers are the municipality and one or two of the area’s biggest business companies. Guðmundsson (2004: 53) concluded in his research on local media that proximity to advertisers and the community could matter:“Thus it is clear that the media is less likely to interfere in disputes in the region, and in some cases, ads have been used to control content”.
Most private news media rely on both subscription and advertising, apart from the free paper Fréttablaðið – and as mentioned above, the leading online news sites are free of charge. Advertising has grown in importance to most media. Kjarninn miðlar is free of charge and its content is available to all, but it also receives monthly voluntary donations amounting to half of its revenue (RÚV, 2017). The public broadcasting service RÚV is mostly funded by the broadcasting tax, but has around 30 per cent of its revenue from advertising.
In April 2021, Statistics Iceland (SI) released its findings on the media advertisements market in Iceland for 2019 (Statistics Iceland, 2021). For the second time, advertising revenues to foreign companies were calculated, and it is estimated that in 2019, about 40 per cent of advertising payments went to foreign companies, compared with 34 per cent the year before.
According to SI’s findings, national media has not just lost its share of the total advertising revenue. In 2019, advertising payments in national media amounted to ISK 11.5 billion, a 17 per cent drop from the previous year, calculated in fixed prices. These payments in 2019 were 41 per cent lower than they were at their highest in 2007, calculated in fixed prices.
Daily and weekly newspapers have traditionally been the most important advertising medium in this country, but have lost a huge share of the market in recent years. In 2019, about 52 per cent of advertising revenues went to television stations, about 21 per cent to daily and weekly newspapers (25% the year before), and 14 per cent to radio (13% in 2018). The share of national online media in advertising revenues has grown slowly but steadily, and it is now estimated that ISK 14 out of every 100 spent on domestic advertising goes to them.
According to Worlds of Journalism Study findings (Ahva et al., 2017), Icelandic journalists themselves did not feel that political or economic factors have much influence on their work. A comparative research of Nordic journalists found that fewer Icelandic journalists, proportionately speaking, found that external economic or political factors impinged on their work (Ahva et al., 2017). In this regard, Icelandic journalists ranked the highest overall in the absence of external influences within their work, with those from Norway and Finland, respectively, following.
All our interviewees – editors and journalists alike – rejected any influence of advertisers on specific editorial content. Advertising clients are diverse, and interviewees were unable to recall the largest advertisers. Most said they were not interested in knowing anything about the advertising shares – it was up to the advertising department – and they focused instead on editorial content. Some of the interviewees did recall specific examples of some advertisers trying to influence news reporting by threatening to withdraw (or withdrawing) adverts, but everyone said these rare instances had not influenced news reporting. A list of the 30 biggest advertisers in print media and television confirmed that there was not a dominant position of any one particular company.
