A range of actors – including Statistics Finland, regulatory authorities, media industry associations, and commercial monitoring agencies – offer mostly structural data on media structures, supply, and use. Instruments to monitor news media content, and issues such as neutrality and diversity, however, are more fragmented and ad hoc.
The 2011 MDM report on Finland noted several attempts to develop more systematic instruments for media content monitoring in Finland. Since then, however, many of these initiatives have been discontinued. The Annual Monitoring of News Media, developed by The Journalism Research and Development Centre of the University of Tampere to survey news media output between 2006 and 2012, for example, was discontinued. Various research projects have developed tools for monitoring reporting on individual issues, such as ethnicity and racism in the media, but they have not developed into organised, permanent monitoring instruments.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications published an annual report on Finnish television programming focused on quantitative analysis of the television output and diversity, based on different programme types until 2015, which has also been discontinued. In 2018, the Ministry commissioned a report on the state of Finnish media and communication policy, which proposed a range of metrics to improve the knowledge base of media policy-making (Ala-Fossi et al., 2018); most of these metrics, however, have not been systematically implemented.
Apart from independent bodies, media organisations themselves do some monitoring. For example, a number of media organisations are using a gender equality tracker to monitor and publicise the balance between men and women as subjects and sources in their news (see also Indicator F9 – Gender equality in media content). The public broadcaster Yle also employs various instruments of content monitoring regarding its mandated obligations.
In addition, discussions on the content of journalism take place in academic studies, professional journals, and of course social media, 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 generally not publicly available.
