Iceland makes the top of the list, when it comes to online news consumption, a study conducted by the OECD revealed. About 93% of the population retrieves news-updates from the world-wide-web.
There used to be something romantic about people sitting in cafés, reading the newspaper in the morning sun, while sipping on a cup of coffee. But let’s be honest, those have become a rare species. What you’ll most likely see now when glancing into a café on your way to work are people squinting their eyes to read online news on their smartphone screen- in Iceland, ostensibly, more than anywhere else in the world, percentage-wise.
Citizen journalism and social media have become a valuable source of information, making traditional media superfluous to some. Fewer and fewer people now want to spend money on a newspaper or be ready just in time to turn on the radio or TV to hear what’s been going on in the world.
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Why Iceland? – You may ask.
In the OECD study, all Scandinavian countries scored over 80% on online news consumption- but none of them as high as Iceland with about 93% of the population resorting to online resources for news-updates. Especially compared to more traditional,Central European countries like France and Italy whose ratios hover at around just half of Iceland’s, it is evident, that Icelanders are at the forefront of integrating technology into their daily lives.
This leadership in online-news-consumption might have come into being because there exists in fact, an incredibly large amount of relatively small online-news publishers in Iceland, considering the humble size of the population. Especially for English-speaking people, the internet offers many alternatives to the traditional Icelandic media represented by the state-owned RÚV or the newspaper Fréttablaðið.
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