Mä lehden luin: Yleisön suhde painettuun ja digitaaliseen sanomalehteen

In the current digital media environment, legacy newspapers and their readers are often regarded obsolete. For media executives and many journalists, the future of news is exclusively digital. Given the economic uncertainties facing the news industry, news producers’ eyes are focussed on audience metrics and their capacities to shed light on how to attract users to news websites.
This book sets out to analyse news reading from the perspective of audience. Employing interviews and obsläs method, it looks into how readers of two Finnish regional newspapers, Hämeen Sanomat and Karjalainen, navigate in three distinct architectures of newspaper: printed, digital replica and online news application. The assumption underlying the analysis is that each of these user interfaces favour somewhat differing reading protocols and routines.
The empirical analysis responds to the question pondered by editors and publishers: Where are the readers? It appears that most of the participants tended to move from one architecture to another depending on how their qualities matched with readers’ contextual and situational needs. In this comparison, the strengths of a printed newspaper seemed evident for many, while the score of pros and cons of reading the news in the digital environment appeared more mixed.
Beside the findings of the empirical audience study, the book evaluates the future of newspaper against statistics of media economy and communication policies. While the newspaper business in Finland struggles with increasing costs and volatility of income, it may well rely on the robust newspaper reading culture among the Finnish reading public.