Significant changes in the business
environment have challenged the established news media companies. Many of the
new forms of media production also challenge the traditional conceptions of
one-way communication and create new modes of audience participation (PEJ,
2011).  While old business models have
been challenged, newspaper publishers are trying to transform themselves into
sustainable digital media companies but often response of the newspapers to
these developments have been quite confusing and inefficient, and various
organizational factors have significantly delayed innovation (Picard, 2011;
Newman, 2018). Short-term revenue streams and income formation expectations of
new innovations and products have been smaller than the revenue streams of the
printed newspaper. This has slowed down investment and new business
development.

Understanding and examining the news
media is important when discussing the changing character of journalism, media
business and media ecosystem. This paper contributes to the discussion about
the digital transformation in the news media, drawing on experiences and development
in Finland. The paper examines online operations and business models of the
Finnish newspaper publishers now and in the near future. An online survey was
concluded among the newspaper editors, CEOs and other key persons. This survey
was an updated and extended follow-up version of a survey that was done in
2013. The survey was sent in early 2017 to 476 persons, and 81 answers were
collected. The response rate of the survey was 17 percent. The respondents
presented both daily and local newspapers, and the selection was geographically
representative. In this paper, our aim is, based on the survey, to present the
views of the Finnish newspaper editors and publishers on the digital
transformation and compare the results with the results of the survey done in
2013.

The results of the survey show that
Finnish newspapers were still somewhat slow to change, maybe because they have
done so well in a protected market. Based on a SWOT analysis, there are
strengths like the strong bond to and knowledge on the local community, an
opportunity that is not yet fully utilised in news media business.