When the mainstream takes over: political magazines’ attempts to cultivate alternativeness in Finland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Finland belongs to the few European countries that have kept alive their party press, but during the past five years, the shrinking party press, one party by one, has changed formats from newspapers to a combination of magazines and websites. These political voices, ranging from conservative to communist, are intriguingly contradictory, as they have moved to the web with support from the magazine, one of the oldest media forms. Finland thus provides an ‘end result’ of a problem met by many European mediascapes today: what is the role of ideological journalism in a situation that prefers speed and topicality? A magazine could provide more space for alternativeness in the forms of time axis, feature style and personal views. However, based on the present study’s findings, a change of format does not seem to be the solution. Parties have continued the practice of replacing journalism by marketing communication in a desperate effort to try to develop ‘something different’. The six party journals examined in this study can be divided into two groups, but in fact, all their expression modes tend to repeat mainstream neutralism. Their ideological markers are limited to choice of themes, interviewees and pictures—and during the research project, one of the most independent-sounding voices shifted to a quarterly.