Iceland’s news media provide for a large variety of news formats, though it has somewhat decreased in the last decade, particularly on regional and local levels.
RÚV’s main television news show at 19:00 normally lasts for around 30 minutes and is also broadcast on its Radio 2 channel. The 19:00 news is followed by another 30-minute news and current affairs programme four days a week called Kastljós. The late-evening news at 22:00 is broadcast four days a week and lasts 15 minutes. Additionally, once a forthnight, RÚV airs the programme Kveikur that is dedicated to investigative and in-depth journalism. On Sunday mornings, meanwhile, there is a weekly live discussion format on current affairs.
The private Channel 2 has a shorter main news format (15–20 minutes) every night at 18:30, but it is not any more sensationalist than the public broadcasting news. The current affairs programme that follows, Ísland í dag, can, however, be said to be more sensationalist, as it focuses more on human interest stories and not just on politics or economic affairs. Kompás,an investigative programme, scrapped for economic reasons in 2009 on Channel 2, restarted in 2019, but it is only aired online on vísir.is.
Both RÚV’s and Sýn’s radio channels have short news flashes every hour. RÚV has two main news formats, at 12:20 and 18:00, 20–30 minutes long. Sýn’s radio Bylgjan has a 15–minute main news format at 12:00, and broadcasts Channel 2’s evening news at 18:30. Both offer two-hour–long morning and afternoon news magazines on weekdays. RÚV’s Radio 1 also has a weekly foreign affairs magazine (Heimskviður) and a weekly discussion format on current affairs. Furthermore, public and private television and radio provide podcasts and are available as web-TV and radio. RÚVRadio 1 used to have regional news format broadcast before the main evening news in the northern, western, and eastern regions of Iceland, but that was cut in 2009.
There are many online news sites, with the most-read ones being affiliates of established media, but there are also online-only news sites (see Indicator E1 – Media ownership concentration national level). All online news sites have a variety of formats: short breaking news, long-reads, short television news formats, and podcasts.
It is a distinctive characteristic of the Icelandic press market that it has “produced neither elite-oriented quality papers nor extremely populistic tabloids” (Karlsson 2004: 242). In a market as small as in Iceland, there is little room for readership segregation based on purchasing capacity and other socioeconomic divisions, and Icelandic newspapers mostly cater to the general public for their readership.
