News and media in Norway

The decline of serious media is something that has been widely commented upon. Traditional media like newspapers and television have a hard time making a profit, and many turn towards a more "tabloidism". They shy away from serious news coverage and fill up their pages and time with pure entertainment. In that respect the willingness of the state-owned TV-channel NRK to do the opposite is truly laudable.

The quality of NRKs news coverage was already great as it was - serious and balanced - and it has had some really great docu-mentaries and programs on current affairs, especially Urix, a program analyzing various foreign affairs/current affairs topics. Now NRK is stepping this up even more, with more time for news and more debate-programs. One of the most promising "newbies" is Supernytt, which is basically news for kids. It takes guts to launch something like that, and I doubt that any commercial channel would have made such a gamble.

This increased focus on serious news and debate is especially welcome because Norway is in my opinion not rife with such. Granted, we do have a great national broadcaster in NRK, and it's main competitor, TV2 does have a dedicated channel to news - kind of like a Norwegian national mini-version of CNN. And we do have some relatively high quality national newspapers. Norway has a highly educated population and a high proportion of newspaper readers. But we are very few, there are only 4,6 millions of us. And in such a tiny market it is infernally hard to run any commercial tv channel or newspaper economically profitable in the same way you could in a larger market like Germany, the UK or even France. So even though we do have some good newspapers (like Dagsavisen and Dagens næringsliv), we do not have anything that is even close to newspapers like Daily Telegraph, The Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, etc.

That is all fair enough though, given the way things are. But what is more lamentable or annoying or whatever, is that in parts of the country (where I live now for example), the good newspapers are not on regular sale. By that I mean that to get them, you will have to subscribe, which I did for a while, but then you will only get them a day or two late. So what we are left with if we want to read the paper version of newspapers are VG and Dagbladet, which are (in my opinion) crap and a waste of time to read.

Anyway. Ari Fleischer, George Bush Jr.'s press secretary, complained that the press always ended stories on a down-note, to point out something negative no matter how positive the main story was. I don't want to do that, since what I meant to do with this post was to praise NRK for what they are doing, which is truly great. So let me just end this by saying: Way to go, NRK!