News media is still central for Danes when it comes to getting news and being informed about society. According to the 2020 Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2020), 84 per cent of the Danish population access news daily, and according to 2019 study Publicistisk Barometer [The Publicist Barometer](Blach-Ørsten et al., 2019), most Danes (76%) considered journalistic news media important or very important for society. According to the report, only 15 per cent of Danish users indicated that they sometimes or often try to avoid news altogether – the second lowest rate (after Japan) among the 38 countries in the sample (Newman et al., 2020).
Overall, news media is widely used in Denmark by all segments of society and on a variety of platforms. Numbers from the Danish part of the Reuters report (see Figure 1) show that from 2013 to 2020, television, although declining, remained the preferred news source for most Danes, with newspapers’ online sites coming second. Social media is the preferred news source of just 13 per cent in 2020 (Schrøder et al., 2020).
However, there is a widening gap between age groups when it comes to platform use, with older generations preferring television and the younger age group preferring social media (see Figure 2).
There were also some differences noted between genders, in patterns of media use: female users (37%) were more likely to have accessed news via social media than male users (24%) (Schrøder et al., 2020).
Geographical cleavages in news consumption exist, though to a relatively minor degree. While users from the Copenhagen region were more likely to consume nationally distributed newspapers (online and offline – 65% reach within the last week), these “big city” papers still reached almost half of the adult population in smaller towns and rural areas as well, where they supplemented regional and local newspaper consumption (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2019).
Overall, age, gender, and geographical differences in news media use are comparatively less pronounced, and many Danes get their news from several different news platforms on a daily basis, with public service platforms (online and offline) still being part of most Danes’ news diet.
