Media concentration and diversity of media content in Finland

Media concentration and diversity of media content in Finland is a one-year research project started in March 2023 and financed by the Prime Minister’s Office.  It investigates in particular the state of news media concentration and its effects on the content offerings as well as the regulation of concentration.

The breadth of media ownership and diversity of content is a key media policy value in a Western democracy like Finland. Recent studies and international comparisons have indicated that the Finnish media industry has become increasingly concentrated and the number of firms has decreased strongly in the new millennium. At the same time, digitalization has revolutionized the earning logic of all media industries, challenged traditional media products and promoted both exit from the market and consolidation in geographically limited markets.

Consolidation and accumulation of ownership in the media industry is generally considered to be a risk for both the market and democracy. From a market perspective, concentration threatens fair competition between companies, as a few large companies prevent the efficient operation of the market. On the other hand, from the perspective of democracy, the social, political and cultural effects of concentration are emphasized as it threatens the quality and variety of information that citizens receive.

Since the concentration of the media industry has significant social consequences, its development must be constantly monitored. Likewise, it is necessary to monitor the effects of concentration on media content and to think about ways to curb concentration and its negative effects on the media industry. There is also a need to know how the media industry itself considers consolidation development, its consequences and attempts to regulate it.

The main goal of the project is to find out what the current state of concentration of media ownership in Finland is . Moreover, the study empirically examines how the concentration of news media has affected the diversity of media content and considers the consequences of concentration in terms of equality of information and freedom of speech.

At the same time, the goal is to map what kind of effects concentration has been found to have on media content internationally and how concentration has been tried to be curbed in key reference countries. The further goal is to use interviews and surveys to find out how the media industry itself and other experts in the field see the effects of concentration on media diversity, equal access to information and freedom of speech.