Despite the small size and limited scope of the Flemish media market, there is a vibrant news market in various formats. However, we gauge that it is less developed than in neighbouring countries. Most of the news formats tend to remain very traditional, with a strong dominance retained by radio, television, newspaper, and magazine formats. The two Flemish news broadcasters – public broadcaster VRT and private media company DPG Media – aside, there are also ten mostly privately owned and run regional television channels providing daily news broadcasts for various Flemish regions. VTM provides three daily news broadcasts on television, whereas VRT has four, and also a few daily news (talk) shows on its second free-to-air television channel Canvas. It also has an Instagram account and a YouTube channel to offer news to younger people.
Print circulation figures are dwindling in Flanders, but not as much as elsewhere in Western Europe. This is in part thanks to the rather controversial, yet ongoing, federal government funding allocated to the national post service, which enables it to deliver newspapers and magazines to subscribers, free of charge to the media companies and consumers. This funding was brought to life in the 1990s to maintain news diversity and has a very high value for the post service too, but critics say it has become outdated and not in line with changed ways of news consumption. Not surprisingly, these critics are situated within the online-only news companies and consider the arrangement unfair competition between them and the “big players”.
It is notable that online news too is predominantly dominated by newspaper brands, with the two largest newspapers also owning the two largest Flemish news websites. The commercial news broadcaster VTM lost its own news website, as it was sacrificed to the growing surge of the biggest overall news website hln.be, which is part of DPG Media, as mentioned earlier. Online-only news media exist, but operate in the fringe of the legacy media. These online-only initiatives are often overtly left- or right-wing oriented. Even though their relevance and popularity were slightly increasing, there are no mainstream influential online-only news outlets, unlike in many other countries. Having said that, they can impact the news provision of more mainstream media, and in that sense, their impact should not be underestimated.
While most legacy news media are active across all social media outlets, public broadcaster VRT is one of the few Flemish media companies to have a designated Instagram channel devoted to providing news content for teenagers and young adults. With over 46,000 followers at the time of writing, the editors-in-chief themselves recently called the account a success among the difficult-to-reach young demographic. Experiments with artificial intelligence and automated journalism are in very early stages and have only rarely reached the masses as of yet.
