Finland's Nelonen Uutuset is now once a day, shortest ever, HS Uutiset. What happened?
To put it bluntly, it's all about ratings. The channel's owners have literally become obsessed with ratings and Nelonen Uutiset wasn't 'performing' - although I have no idea why as the main presenter Marco Bjurstrom (who has been laid off along with scores of other journalists) is hugely popular in Finland. The news service has now been reduced to a 2 minute round-up at 655pm. Their reason for not completely killing off the news is because they have a license requirement to 'broadcast news'. The problem is that it doesn't specify how much news so they are able to get away with this! The HS branding is Helsingin Sanomat - Finland's biggest newspaper, so they're really just using the bulletin to promote the newspaper and it's online multimedia news presence.
I don't think people are watching news just to see the famous celebrities. They are willing to see what is happening right now.
I'm not a native Finnish so I can't understand the language at all, and therefore don't know if they are good presenters or not. But I find Mikko Hirvonen and Pasi Tuohimaa best. Hope they, as well as all the Nelonen Uutiset staffs laid off, find new place in YLE and MTV3.
(Now waiting Kendo Yanar's answer.)
Taking a quick look at the TV Forum after some weeks and all of a sudden I find people talking about Finnish news. Sorry to touch on a week-and-a-half old response, by the way.
globaltraffic24 told pretty much everything there is to it. It all started during the big Sanoma layoffs in October, also known as #Sanomassacre. At first they threatened not to broadcast any news at all, but then LVM - the Finnish Ofcom equivalent - reminded them of their PSB commitments. Slightly after this the company announced that Nelonen's half-hour programme at 6:30 pm would immediately be cut to 15 minutes beginning at 6:45, with the late bulletin getting sacked. Despite these cutbacks, Sanoma still decided to sack Nelosen uutiset completely in January and started broadcasting these two-minute HS bulletins to fill public service requirements. Shameful.
As for the new jobs of old Nelonen workers, their editor-in-chief Eero Hyvönen recently became Yle Häme's regional head. And as for the popularity of Marco Bjurström amongst the people, he's done a long career in showbusiness and dancing. He hadn't done any news at all before signing with Nelonen in late 2012. I guess he now goes back to teaching dance moves to the youth...
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As usual, I'd like to take a look at some Finnish television history related to this case. This isn't the first time such a move has happened in Finnish television: in 2009, a station backed by some religious organisations,
SuomiTV
, aimed to become a major national network and naturally put a lot of effort into news with multiple bulletins every night. They didn't have a lot of viewers and after 1,5 years they decided that it just wasn't worth it, calling the game off. To fill the PSB requirements and to keep the ever-nagging LVM bureaucrats happy, SuomiTV made a contract with the state-owned news agency STT to broadcast a nightly three-minute radio bulletin accompanied with a web camera (yes, the same kind of camera we use with Skype) feed from the newsroom at 5:22 pm. After the channel's takeover by Fox International in April 2012, the nightly radio bulletin is still on air alongside an overnight simulcast of Sky News International.