The Journalism Research and Development Centre of the University of Tampere has sought to develop an observation system, Annual Monitoring of News Media (2006 -2012), to survey news media output and reveal ongoing trends in the Finnish news media (Suikkanen & Syrjälä 2010). The objects of the analysis include subject matters, people featured by age and gender, the geographical perspective of items, and material on violence and sexuality. In addition, various research projects have developed tools for monitoring reporting on individual issues, such as ethnicity and racism in the media.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications publishes an annual report on Finnish television programming (Lehtinen 2010). Instead of issue monitoring, however, the report focuses on quantitative analysis of the television output and diversity, based on different program types. A similar type of overview has also been commissioned to produce a description of the programming supply of the license-dependent radio channels in Finland (Ala-Fossi & Haara 2010). outside these systematic monitoring instruments, discussions on the content of journalism take place in academic studies and professional journals, but for the most part these do not constitute continuous monitoring instruments. A number of commercial media monitoring services also keep track of reporting on specific issues for subscribing clients, but their results are not publicly available. overall, the status of regular content monitoring in Finland seems to be improving, but existing instruments have yet to become fully institutionalized or well-known.
