The Finnish public has traditionally been quite well informed. Most Finns still consume news media at least on a weekly basis, but the overall reach of news has slightly declined during recent years – especially, the reach of printed newspapers and traditional television has declined. However, in Finland, the online services and applications of traditional media are still followed by 76 per cent of the respondents, which is more than in Sweden (72%) or Norway (71%) (Reunanen, 2019: 7–8). In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic in the beginning of 2020 has increased people’s interest in news and current affairs programming, especially television (Matikainen et al., 2020; Koppinen, 2020).
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Similar to a decade ago, the main evening news broadcasts of public service broadcaster Yle and commercial MTV3continue to be among the most-watched programmes on television. The average total reach of Yle News is nearly 2.5 million viewers (Finnpanel, 2020a). However, unlike before, only the three Yle channels and MTV3 now provide broadcast television news – all the other television channels have either abandoned news production or they have never been obligated to provide any news. Despite a small decline, Yle Radio Suomi continues to be the most popular radio channel, with 31 per cent share of total listening. It still broadcasts regular hourly news bulletins, which, however, are a bit shorter than those it broadcasted earlier (Finnpanel, 2020b; Yle, 2016).
Perhaps the most dramatic change in media use since the 2011 MDM report has been the collapse of print newspaper readership. In 2008, the leading newspaper HS still had a circulation of 400,000 copies and about 950,000 daily readers. Ten years later, the print circulation was only 221,000 copies with 562,000 daily readers. This shows a 40 per cent decline within ten years (Statistics Finland 2020b). However, HS is an exception, because since 2017, it has been able to increase its total readership 26 per cent with all-digital subscriptions. Other newspapers are also gaining digital subscribers, but this is lower in proportion to the loss they suffer from readers of print editions (Hartikainen, 2020). The combined weekly reach of newspaper content on all platforms is still quite high (92%), while the weekly reach of printed newspapers is just 12 per cent (Reunanen, 2019).
The five most-popular websites in Finland are still exactly those that were popular in 2011, although their respective order, as well as the methodology of measurement, has changed. Tabloid newspapers with free online content are still the two most-popular news websites, with over 3.8 million monthly visitors. In December 2019, public service Yle news and current affairs were seen to be slightly more popular than MTV3 News and the HS website (FIAM, 2019). At present, the Internet is the main source of news for everyone between the ages 45–54 years and younger. Among people over 55 years of age, television is still the main source of news, while printed newspapers are important to many people over 65 years old (Reunanen, 2019).
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