Ever since the launch of the World Press Freedom Index almost 20 years ago, Finland has always been among the top five countries of the index. It has had the best ranking in the world twelve times, beating all its Nordic neighbours except Norway. According to the annual Reuters Digital News reports, Finnish people also have the highest level of trust in the news media and one of the highest levels of press readership in the EU. Most of the media companies in the happiest country of the world are doing quite well, while Google and Facebook have much less dominant role in the advertising market than elsewhere in Europe.

In this context, you might expect Finland to have a comprehensive and visionary media and communications policy to support democracy and a sustainable media market. However, our meta-study of Finnish media and communications policy based on two recent reports for the Ministry of Transport and Communications, other earlier studies, official documents as well as statistical data suggests that is not the case. Our political-economic analysis shows that most decisions have been pragmatic ad hoc solutions serving economic interests rather than any specific media and communication policy goals.  A closer examination proves also that Finland does not fit into the so called Nordic Media Welfare State model either, despite long shared history or cultural ties. This has long-term effects on media sustainability as a whole.

For example, the traditional Nordic system of press subsidies is designed to support media diversity and the plurality of opinions. For this aim, it is based on a combination of direct support for selected titles in need and an indirect tax support in form of reduced or zero-rate VAT for the newspapers and magazines. However, unlike its western neighbours, Finland abolished the direct press subsidies about 30 years ago and 10 years ago, it raised the VAT of printed press from zero to 10 percent. Both decisions were officially aimed to relieve a sudden and deep fiscal crisis of the state with no publicly expressed media policy goals.

While the direct press subsidies had always been much smaller than indirect tax support, abandoning them was fatal only for so-called second and third newspapers in competitive markets. In addition, the remaining indirect support favoured big papers with the largest circulations. This, in turn accelerated a series of acquisitions and ownership concentration of the Finnish newspapers. As a result, the Finnish newspaper publishing industry is now highly consolidated. Most of the remaining newspapers have reached a monopoly-like position in their region, as they own the majority or all the local papers in the surrounding area. This means that although Finland is a very sparsely inhabited country, there are practically no “news deserts” even in the northernmost parts of the country. Big media companies have concentrated administration, sales as well as printing and journalistic content production of their papers resulting in less diversity and fewer jobs, but many local brands in the corporate portfolio.