Over the past decade, the leading Finnish news media organisations have radically reformed their strategic thinking about news production and distribution. Most newspapers, including HS, have abandoned broadsheet format for tabloid format; traditional broadcasters like Yle and MTV3 have invested more in online services instead of television and radio; and after experiments with specialised production groups, practically everybody has adopted an overall strategy to put digital first – or mobile first. The printed edition of the newspaper or the main evening news broadcast on television or radio are no longer the main platforms for news, but rather by-products of continuous daily news production for online and mobile audiences.
In this context, however, it seems that actual processes of news selection and news processing in leading news media organisations in Finland has changed much less than one would expect. Most respondents emphasised the importance of the traditional “morning meeting” for news selection (or in some cases, two morning meetings, with the first held among the heads of all departments and the second in each department separately). Longer, more demanding or labour-intensive stories must be more carefully planned beforehand, but shorter stories are usually produced and published as quickly as possible. There is also no longer only one daily deadline. Although the plans for the day are made in the morning, the actual outcome is usually a result of continuous negotiations between journalists in the newsroom.
The 2011 MDM study pointed out that Finnish media organisations had already adopted some sort of stylebook, or they were preparing one. However, it seems that most of them have remained for internal use only. Evidently, theSTT and public broadcasting company Yle are the only ones with comprehensive stylebooks and editorial guidelines; they are also publicly available online. Yle has also updated its own ethical guidelines for news and content production twice after Sipilägate (2017 and 2019)and has additionally created a special “concept bible” to help the introduction of audience segmentation into Yle online news journalism (Hokka, 2019) – but this document has not yet been published.
