Swedish is Finland’s second official language, yet less than 6% of the population are native speakers. This percentage has declined by half over the last century, leaving only 300,000 Swedish-speaking Finns today.
Finland’s Swedish media landscape has diminished alongside the decline. Several Swedish-language outlets, however, are keeping their literary tradition alive while finding innovative ways to survive.
Here’s how they are doing it:
Refocusing priorities
Hufvudstadsbladet, which roughly translates to “Journal of the Capital,” is the largest Swedish-speaking newspaper in Finland.
“We are a national newspaper, a newspaper for the Swedish-language community in Finland and a local newspaper for the capital region,” said Hufvudstadsbladet’s newly appointed editor-in-chief, Kalle Silfverberg.
The major challenges Hufvudstadsbladet faces today, according to Silfverberg, include competing for people’s time and money and appealing to younger people’s priorities. To keep the public interested, Hufvudstadsbladet has decided to focus its content on topics “that motivate someone to pay for their subscription,” said Silfverberg. This includes politics, the economy, culture, the Swedish community in Finland, and opinion pieces.
Covering the Swedish community is especially key, Silfverberg said. Hufvudstadsbladet is the only newspaper in Finland covering the community on a national level. To ensure they keep that position, the paper’s board started researching how to secure a healthy financial future.
Hufvudstadsbladet was recently acquired by the Swedish company, Bonnier News, which now owns 51% percent of the newspaper. The biggest advantage resulting from the change in ownership, said Silfverberg, is the increase in technical capacity: they can now tap into the Bonnier team to access more skills and know-how.
“It’s a guarantee that Hufvudstadsbladet will be published in the future. It’s great to have access to the knowledge within the biggest media organization in the Nordics,” he said. From being a small fish in the sea, Hufvudstadsbladet is now a bigger actor in the Finnish media industry with more resources to experiment with and widen their reach.
Multi-talented staff
Finland’s oldest print newspaper still in circulation is called Åbo Underrättelser. It is a regional Swedish-speaking newspaper covering the western part of Finland.
“Some days can be very exhilarating to see how we manage to put it all together,” said Tom Simola, Åbo Underrättelser’s editor-in-chief, when he spoke about keeping the newspaper up and running.
Resources are stretched to make this viable. For example, Åbo Underrättelser does not have any technical personnel, and its reporters maintain the website themselves. The newspaper is distributed in print five days a week and the website is updated daily, Simola explained.
“We have a very versatile personnel who have considerable knowledge about a lot: about the editorial content, technical aspects, and different tools. They are also ready to jump in and help if needed. That’s what we live on. We have knowledgeable employees who are very motivated,” he said.
Losing Åbo Underrättelser would be a big loss for the region and for the Swedish language. Very few institutions in the area exist nowadays that bring together Swedish speakers, and it would be “devastating” for the Swedish language to lose a platform that raises questions, covers what is happening and gives people opportunities to highlight their worries and needs, explained Simola.
“A national paper will never be able to replace a local paper,” he said. “We are present on the ground.” But it is an expensive solution, he added, and the financial situation is challenging.
The newspaper has experimented with various solutions to sustain itself. Currently, it receives two thirds of its income from subscriptions, and one third from advertisements. They have also accessed government grants for minority media.
Last spring, Åbo Underrättelser ran a six-month trial printing online news articles from the national public broadcaster in their daily paper, and the newsroom also swaps content with a regional paper from the Åland islands. Based in a university city, they have also tried free subscriptions for students, though this proved less successful as students weren’t as interested.
Last year, the paper moved into the Raasepori area which was already dominated by the Swedish-speaking newspaper, Västra Nyland. The Swedish community in Finland is small and most people know each other. It can be awkward to enter a market and directly challenge an established newspaper.
Still, competition isn’t bad: there is space for multiple products, said Simola: “In the end it is the readers that enjoy it. That there are multiple media that monitor their issues.”
Hyperlocal is a success
Hyperlocal options point to a potential way forward. Nya Östis is one such newspaper in the Loviisa area, founded in 2015 after other local papers merged together. The merger resulted in many locals feeling like they received increasingly less news about what was happening in their backyard.
Nya Östis was founded as a response, and nearly a decade later the paper is still published in print once a week, reaching 2,500 subscribers.
In contrast to most media today, Nya Östis has strayed away from digital. There is no online version of the paper that you can buy, and only a few shorter articles are published online. The newsroom works exclusively with freelancers, and even the editor-in-chief Carita Liljendahl is a contractor. The team personally delivers the paper to a few local shops that sell them.
Although Nya Östis has a loyal subscription base and is able to generate income through subscriptions and advertisements, the newsroom has also been hit by the current economic situation. This year the outlet had to increase the price of their annual subscription by 10 euros. It wasn’t much, said Liljendahl, but it was the first increase in many years.
To generate story ideas, the paper receives tips through its Facebook group, which has over 5,000 members. The paper also uses the Facebook group to engage with subscribers: the group has evolved to become a virtual town square for people from the local area to gather. Many group members aren’t actually subscribers, but everyone has an interest in the local area. They share posts about the town that they find interesting and will post about their own lives, uploading pictures about the weather or the first snow, among others, to the group.
Hyperlocal is the key to a prosperous future, Liljendahl believes. “Those kinds of newspapers have the future ahead of them,” she said. ”I wish more people would see that.”
Photo by Julius Jansson on Unsplash.