Television has an overwhelming presence in the country, its total reachis 84.0 per cent of the population more than four years of age (about 8 million people; see Table 4).
[supsystic-tables id=71]
In 2009, every citizen spent an average of 3 hours and 29 minutes a day watching television. In 2018, these numbers went up to 4 hours, 43 minutes, and 35 seconds (ERC, 2018). However, news and information do not have a very strong presence in the programming of the main channels, when compared with entertainment and fiction, particularly in comparison to popular Portuguese and Brazilian soap operas known as telenovelas.
However, the evening news bulletins of the three main chains (TVI, SIC, and RTP1), all broadcast at the same time (20:00), are still usually among the top-10 programmes every week. Both leaders (TVI and SIC) have audience rates around 10–13 per cent, meaning circa one million people. These news bulletins, however, are very often a mix of a few hard and many soft news items, entertainment and fait-divers. These last for about one and a half hours, particularly in the two private commercial channels – SIC and TVI. Since information programmes (debates, interviews, news magazines, etc.) virtually disappeared from the free-to-air channels, the evening news bulletins got longer and longer, including for those genres that would previously be part of specific information programmes (Lopes, 2007).
In the last ten years, there was a very strong increase in pay-TV (distributed by cable), largely exceeding all the open access channels, as can be seen in Table 4. Today, the four free-to-air channels have a total share of 48.8 per cent, compared to 81.9 per cent in 2009.
It is important to note that there are in cable television there are now three chains exclusively devoted to news and information: SIC Notícias (SIC group), TVI 24 (TVI group), RTP3 (RTP group – PBS). There is also a fourth one mostly devoted to the news too, CMTV. This is owned by Cofina, the group that owns the popular daily Correio da Manhã. This means that the three main players in free-to-air television also have a smaller news channel on cable television, although with comparatively low audience rates with an average of 1 per cent for RTP3, 1.5 per cent for TVI 24, 1.8 per cent for SIC Noticias and 4.1 per cent for the popular CMTV. It is perhaps because of this that the time devoted to news and information, in the four main free-to-air television channels, is not very high. It is 27 per cent in RTP1, 17 per cent in RTP2, 18 per cent in SIC, and 19 per cent in TVI (Marktest, 2020b).
Compared with television, newspapers have a lower reach. Still, according to Bareme Imprensa (Marktest, 2019b), a total of 76.8 per cent of Portuguese people aged 15 or more, circa 6.6 million, had some contact with newspapers or magazines in 2019. The average audience rate for newspapers was 50.3 per cent in 2019, corresponding to 4.3 million people. Despite this, Portugal consistently continues to be in the list of European countries with lower rates of press readership. The figures for the main newspapers show important losses between 2009 and 2019 in terms of circulation (see Table 5). The same does not occur in terms of audience, because more and more people read the online versions.
[supsystic-tables id=72]
The websites of traditional newspapers rank among the most visited in the country in terms of news. They keep growing very fast but the fact that measurement criteria have changed recently doesn’t allow for comparisons with years before 2018. There reach is rather high too, as can be seen in Table 6.
[supsystic-tables id=73]
As for radio, the total reach was 57 per cent of the population over 15 in 2009, it is now 60 per cent (Marktest, 2009; Marktest, 2020b). However, the radio station almost exclusively devoted to news (TSF) has an average audience of 3.3 per cent, which is about 250,000 people. The time spent listening to the radio seems to be stable over time: 3 hours and 15 minutes per day in 2010, 3 hours 8 minutes in 2019 (Marktest, 2009; Marktest, 2020b). However, there are changes concerning the places where people listen to the radio, now listening to it less at home and more in the car (72.4% of the total) and through the Internet (15.7%) (ERC, 2019c: 124). We should add that, presently, there are 329 radio stations active in the country, of which only 6 are national in range, 5 regional, and the rest local with many of them accessible only through the Internet (ERC, 2019c: 125).
With this media consumption landscape, we can say that there is a fairly high interest in news and information in the country. According to data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019: 102–103), 61 per cent of Portuguese people say they are “very much” or “much” interested in news, and 25 per cent of them say they look for news more than six times a day. Inversely, 41.5 per cent say they are tired of the high quantity of news they permanently face. Portugal also scores very high in the Reuters report rankings on trust in news: 58 per cent of Portuguese people say they trust in the news most of the time (only Finland scores higher with 59%), although only 27 per cent trust news when it comes to them via social media (Newman et al., 2019: 20–21).
Television continues to be the main source of news and information (58%), followed by the Internet (30.9%, including social media) with radio and press far behind (5.8% and 3.8% respectively). The relative importance of television is much higher among older people, while younger people increasingly prefer the Internet and social media as a source for news. The main way people access online news is through social media (26.3%) which is higher than access through news websites (20.4%). One of the reasons to do so is to escape any direct payment. Only 7.1 per cent of Portuguese people admit to having paid for news online in 2018. This was one of the lowest figures among the 38 countries monitored by DNR, with the average being 13 per cent. Not surprisingly, 47.2 per cent of Portuguese people regularly use a news aggregator, with Google News used more than any other (36.1%). All this helps to explain why news outlets are having more and more problems with their business since they lose money in two ways. They are selling their product or service to fewer people, and they have less advertising because advertisers tend to prefer platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.
The way to access news is also changing rapidly. 62.3 per cent of users prefer to do this using a smartphone (in 2015, they were only 34%), while 57 per cent use a computer (they were 78% in 2015) (Cardoso et al., 2019).
The overwhelming presence of television has relevant consequences for the business too as its share of advertising is much higher than the share for newspapers, radio, or even the Internet (see Table 7). Although things are changing in this domain, with growing advertisement on the Internet, they are not changing rapidly enough to affect television’s market share.
[supsystic-tables id=74]
