Estonia’s dailies lost their importance the moment they gave up reporting the news

For nearly two decades, I’ve followed the evolution of Estonian news, witnessing firsthand the decline in quality that parallels the shift towards chasing clicks and audience numbers. As the media landscape changes, so too does the nature of news—often at the expense of depth and serious reporting. The decline of print newspapers may be inevitable, but the real concern lies in the gradual erosion of the media’s essential role in informing and educating the public.

This opinion piece first appeared in Estonian translation in Maaleht on 8 February 2024.

I’ve been an avid reader of Estonian news since I first arrived here in December 2006. My understanding of the language was good enough to read Estonian fluently after about a year, so I can safely say that I’ve able to follow the development of the main Estonian newspapers very closely for pretty much the last 17 years.

And I’m convinced that in the matter of what declined first, reader interest in print newspapers or the quality of their content, it was the latter.

Not that I would want to blame any journalist for that. Far from it. In three and a half years in an editors’ office, I saw up close what challenges local journalists are faced with every day.

Short or long, hard or soft—wherever there is a message to get across, those producing it will run into these questions sooner or later. As a journalist, do you focus on what will get attention and clicks, or do you focus on what you think is important for people to understand? Do you make it an easily digestible overview, or do you analyse what you’re looking at in greater depth?

What gets published in the end will always depend on the business goals, and the management priorities, of whatever news organisation you look at.

What I saw working in public media was that this dynamic was defined by the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, now also rounded out by social media. TV got the most attention, online had all the news first, and the IT department got all the money. Radio struck me as by far the most experienced and grounded medium, probably because they had always worked on an all-day publication schedule.

But this triangle—attention, information, and money—is what has defined the media more than anything else over the last twenty years. Clicks and audiences against the selection of what is covered, and how a publication is run and funded. Attention translates into money, no matter if as a result of advertising space sales or a state budget allocation—and the battle for the audience can turn into a death trap for plenty of publications.

And I think it’s here where things started to slowly fall apart.

The first problem was that stories for a static publication needed to be selected out of a choice of news updates that developed and ran across a 24-hour cycle. There, the question then became: what do we show readers in this mere snapshot we’re left to work with?

Unless you build a response device into a printed medium, it is difficult to gauge how popular it is with its readers, and so it was easy to look to the easily measurable performance of the online news to answer the question what to print once a day. And so the trap virtually all of Estonia’s papers walked into, perhaps with the exception of the weeklies and monthlies, was that they chose what to print based on what was popular online.

This led to a steady erosion of the serious news—otherwise known as the principally important news—in the printed papers. To any reader of Postimees and Päevaleht, the easily recognisable logic of the publisher was that there was no point printing any detail on stories that would change, and thus overtake, what was written in a daily paper anyway.

Big mistake.

I used to love the days at ERR when something big happened. Nothing was quite like seeing web traffic skyrocketing as the entire country turned to us as its most trusted source of news—to see whether or not what they were hearing was true.

The importance of this cannot be underestimated. People subscribe to papers and go to online news sources like ERR to establish and expand their baseline of understanding about what is going on in the world.

They don’t do it for entertainment, they don’t do it to kill 15 minutes over their morning coffee and the paper. They do it to check what’s going on that actually matters.

By now you can imagine where this is going. If you follow the development of clicks on various online articles throughout a 24-hour period, or across an overall ranking of which type of article or program is popular, you’ll end up with the sensational, the personal, and the emotional. The sort of stuff people will spend an hour on.

And there is the trap. People read their daily paper to keep up with what is important, not to look for entertainment. Following the clicks—and shifting to sensational stuff, opinion, and magazine-like content—didn’t increase the popularity of the newspaper.

On the contrary, it moved the paper out of the essentials bracket into the entertainment bracket, where it is up against anything you can think of, from books to sudoku magazines to TV shows to hobbies.

And thus started the slow and inevitable demise of the Estonian newspaper: with an increasing focus on cheap popularity statistics.

The death of the newspaper is likely irreversible. But publications should be wary of other side effects as well. Focusing on clicks and budget allocations instead of the basic role of the Fourth Estate, there to ensure a well-informed electorate, will also lead to a steady decrease in overall media quality.

As editor of ERR’s English news, I used to repeat, ad nauseam, that there is no point in focusing on magazine-style content and features unless we first offer a steady stream of basic hard news. The simple reason for this being that people won’t be able to understand and do anything with the features unless they have a good picture of what’s happening in general.

This didn’t get me many fans. But I did get us the respect of well-informed and important people. Perhaps that is the lesson here: the news media should focus on quality and their original task of informing the public, and not on popularity contests. Because in the age of Netflix, they will always lose the latter.