The paper focuses on how newspaper companies in three Nordic
countries tackle the challenges of online content distribution and
platformization. The study uses three different data sets (market data, data on
financial performance and interview data) from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The
paper relies predominantly on the qualitative data, which consists of
semi‐structured in‐depth interviews (N=30) with CEOs, editors‐in‐chief, and other
managers in leading newspaper companies, media professionals in newspaper associations
and media academics at universities. The paper demonstrates how, in the Nordic newspaper
companies, the outlook concerning the major social media companies, primarily
Facebook and Google, can be distinguished between collaborating in distribution
with them, or developing a competing online platform. Some of the companies
prefer to utilize one of these some use both strategies simultaneously.