The impact of ownership change and its effect on content and work, based on the perception of journalists, was studied by Ville J.E. Manninen and Lauri Haapanen from University of Jyväskylä (Ville also used to write for JRN and is in our team, even if inactive for the moment). The context was Finland, where there has been a recent trend of centralization in ownership to fewer owners.
Many researchers (e.g. Trappel and Meier 2022) consider this centralization a threat to democracy, and there are many downsides associated with it. As an example, it reduces competition through content quality (Lacy 1987), the market failure risk is increased (Grotta 1971), content duplication is incentivized (Hendrickx and Remoortere 2021) – which we see in Finnish media. Additionally, such communicative power can be abused for political or economic gain (Neff and Benson 2021; Wagner and Collins 2014).
However, some studies have discovered positive results (Garz and Ots 2025), but the authors caution that there is a great variety in research goals, methods, and measures, thus the different studies are not directly comparable. They themselves focus on how journalists (N=37) perceive the changes in ownership and the implications to work and content.
In Finland, the media sector includes the publicly owned broadcaster Yleisradio (YLE), funded with taxes, and subscription-based newspapers (and private broadcasters, but this study focused on newspapers). The sector traces its origins to the late 19th century and early 20th century – to the pre-independence era, where a national identity was being built. They were often regional, with the diversity in politics narrowing to socialist and bourgeois papers in the early 20th century (Tommila and Salokangas 1998)
The number of papers and their circulation peaked in the early 1990s, but since then, the turnover has fallen. Some owners exited the market, while others pursued growth by acquisitions. Nowadays, it is typical for the same company to both regional and local papers in a given area. The conditions, under which the regional newspapers operate, have been termed “monopoly-like” (Lehtisaari et al. 2024:10).
All of the interviews were conducted by the first author (Manninen), and they were done in person following a semi-structured format with the following themes: (A) personal work history, (B) experiences with ownership change, (C) owner-induced changes in journalistic work, and (D) other influences on journalistic work during 2013–2023. The average length was 70 minutes.
General trends 2013-2023 in the sector were discovered: the media transformation affected “everything all the time, regardless of who owns the outlet”, as one Editor-in-Chief put it. 19 of the interviewees suggested that digital transition is an universal trend not dependent on the owners. The number of journalists in newsrooms has also declined, a 30% decrease.
According to the interviews, most of the newspapers had begun to place more emphasis on their online offering, many adopting a “digital-first” strategy. The Covid pandemic was often the pivot point, mirroring findings from Norway (Sjøvaag, Owren, and Borgen 2020: 1188).
Owner-related changes, the central question in the study, shaped newsroom practices. The vehicle for these changes has primarily been structural, enhanced internal collaboration, and centralised decision-making. However, the interviewed journalists largely perceived the acquisitions positively or neutrally. Integration into a larger media company was seen as a means of getting more operational stability and technological advancement.
The acquisitions were often anticipated by the journalists, as they saw measures taken by previous owners such as cutting expenses, and were aware of the sector-wide financial trends. Sometimes the new owners made the savings, and they varied widely. There were also changes that caused discontent: such as the reduction in layout tasks as these were centralized, or the change in visual style to be reminiscent of a different paper. The networks were also naturally reshaped. However, none objected to content sharing per se, as long as the use was measured.
Media owners actively encourage analytics-driven journalism and a digital-first approach – the turn to analytics is part of an industry-wide trend. In all seven acquired newspapers, 14 interviewees mentioned the owners encouraging analytics-driven journalism.
In conclusion, there was a strong consistency in how the interviewees viewed the ten year period. There was considerable hardship, adaptation, and survival – although none mentioned direct owner influence on content. As a rule, the ownership changes caused an overhaul in software, and they reshaped the collaborative networks. Nevertheless, the majority expressed neutral or positive attitudes towards the changes. There was considerable homogeneity in the findings across the sample.
The article “Journalists’ Perceptions of Ownership Change and its Impact on Journalistic Content and Work” by Ville J.E. Manninen and Lauri Haapanen is in Journalism Practice. (Open access).
Picture: Untitled by Yaroslav Zakharchenko.
License Unsplash.
