Even if news media is available all over Sweden, it tends to reach people to a lesser extent than before. News is consumed regularly by segments of the population, but overall figures of news consumption are declining. As shown by data from Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 22 per cent of Swedish media consumers consider themselves news avoiders and actively stay away from news often or sometimes (Newman et al., 2019).
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report also indicates that peoples’ general use of specific media as a news source is going down. Traditional media like print newspapers have seen a decline between 2016 and 2019, going from 43 per cent of the population saying they use newspapers as a news source to 30 per cent. During the same period, television figures have dropped from 72 to 67 per cent and the trend is the same for social media, where numbers have decreased from 56 per cent in 2016 to 46 per cent in 2019 (Newman et al., 2019). The decline of social media news use is partly a result of changed Facebook algorithms, and partly an effect of regional news media focusing more on their own websites.
News consumption patterns have changed, and the most remarkable trend in recent years is that tabloids have a much larger digital audience compared with their print versions. Radio and television news still reach more people in broadcast formats, while local and regional newspapers have about the same reach in print and digital versions (see Table 3). A huge majority of Swedish digital news consumers (70%) access news on smartphones, which is one of the highest figures in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019).
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These results are confirmed to a large extent by national surveys of media use in Sweden. They also show great differences in generational media use, as young people (aged 16–29) have social media as their main news source. 69 per cent in this age category regularly consume news on social media platforms, compared with 16 per cent of social media users among senior citizens. Even if there have always been age-based differences in news consumption, the contemporary generational digital divide based on social media use is remarkable (Andersson, 2019).
The above-mentioned trends confirm an ongoing transformation of media usage patterns in Sweden. The overall decline in news consumption and the increased gaps between younger and older audiences are the main reasons for lowering the grade of this indicator from three in 2011 to two a decade later.
