Is There a Nordic News Media System? A descriptive comparative analysis of Nordic news audiences

In media systems theory, the Nordic countries are often held to constitute a specifc media
system (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In this article, we put this claim to the test in the area of
news consumption. Based on fndings about the four Nordic countries Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, and Finland in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al.,
2019), and inspired by previous studies of the audience dimension of media systems (Hölig
et al., 2016; Peruško et al., 2015; Van Damme et al., 2017), we undertake a descriptive
empirical analysis of the 2019 data of this 38-country study. Our study compares news
audience practices in the Nordic countries with those of countries belonging to other
supranational media systems. We fnd that while there are some internal diferences within
the Nordic media system, there are salient news consumption commonalities that are
specifc to the Nordic countries, such as preferred sources of news, pathways to news,
paying for online news, and trust in the news.