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Sweden: State Support to Newspapers in Transition

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State Aid for Newspapers

Part of the book series: Media Business and Innovation ((MEDIA))

Abstract

Newspapers in Sweden have traditionally held a strong position in the media landscape. They have long been in the centre of public debate and stood out as dominant sources of local and regional news coverage in the country. Readership figures are still among the highest in the world, and until the 1990s, when the audiovisual sector was deregulated, the newspaper industry enjoyed an unrivalled position also on the advertising market. However, during the last decade, the shift has been dramatic. Competition from commercial Internet and TV companies has since cut deep into the newspaper advertising market share, and circulation figures dropped relentlessly year by year.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the leading institute for measuring internet traffic in Sweden, KIA Index, Aftonbladet has had five to six million unique weekly browsers visiting the site during 2012 (http://www.kiaindex.se).

  2. 2.

    Throughout this paper monetary figures are translated into Euros at the rate 1 Euro = 9 Swedish kronor.

  3. 3.

    The Statute of Annual Press Subsidies (Presstödsförordningen) was passed in 1990 and has been modified a number of times since then; see http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/fakta/a9900524.htm.

  4. 4.

    Consequently, free dailies and evening tabloids have never been eligible for support.

  5. 5.

    This means that a newspaper cannot use the support to dump market prices of subscriptions.

  6. 6.

    This helps preventing newspapers from applying multiple times for each of its different editions.

  7. 7.

    The upper ceiling of the subsidy levels for urban newspapers has been lowered after an EU complaint 2007 (SFS 2010:1119).

  8. 8.

    Presstödsnämnden, http://www.presstodsnamnden.se

  9. 9.

    These annual reports have been produced since 1976 by the Press Subsidies Council http://www.presstodsnamnden.se. The developments of the reports and their methods applied have been more explicitly described by Gustafsson (2010b, 2012).

  10. 10.

    This figure is calculated based on newspaper companies without operating support (Gustafsson 2012).

  11. 11.

    In the directives to the 2012 press investigation it is explicitly stated that resource efficiency is a priority in any changes of the subsidy system (Dir. 2011: 112).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC), Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden

    Mart Ots

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  1. University of Salzburg ICT&S Center, Salzburg, Austria

    Paul Murschetz

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Ots, M. (2013). Sweden: State Support to Newspapers in Transition. In: Murschetz, P. (eds) State Aid for Newspapers. Media Business and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35691-9_19

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