For all I know I am in the right place as far as reading is concerned. Recently I’ve been plodding through all kinds of statistics for you, so what follows is the juicy stuff, or at least I believe there’s something really interesting in these numbers which are quite telling and just as appropriate for the point I am trying to make here.

If you’ve ever been to Finland and stopped by any store or kiosk to pick up your favorite magazine, you’ve probably noticed that there was an incredible amount of papers and magazines in Finnish you had to shuffle through before you could maybe find something in English, or maybe in Swedish. Well, that at least was my experience and as a result I got brave enough to pick up a Finnish language version of National Geographic, even though I’d been around only for a week at that time and was completely new to the language. Nevertheless, I was, and still am astounded at how many different magazines, papers and other periodicals there are in the stands only in Finnish.

This might sound like a silly observation to you, but my experience from, for instance, Slovenia is that there are many more foreign language periodicals than Slovene language ones. Although this might have changed in the last two years a bit, I seriously doubt the balance would have shifted the other way. Just for the illustration, in Finland more than 300 different periodicals on various topics of culture, science or based around other intellectual viewpoints are published regularly. This number does not include tons of new-age magazines for women, men, children, teenagers, car or gun nuts, which are published in Finnish too. And they still say that the market can take more.

Let’s dig deeper into the numbers.

The three most read Finnish daily newspapers have in the year 2006 on average published 676.735 copies every day of the week, of which Helsingin Sanomat alone had a daily average circulation of 426.117 copies (the other two being Aamulehti with 138.258 and Turun Sanomat 112.360). In other words Helsingin Sanomat has the highest circulation among all the newspapers published in the Nordic countries. And I should mention that none of these three largest Finnish papers are tabloids, or are based on yellow journalism. Just for the record, the two most read tabloids are Ilta-Sanomat with 186.462 and Iltalehti with 133.007 copies published six days a week. That’s a lot of newspapers, almost a million copies daily (996.204, to be precise), and we’re talking only five newspapers here.

It’s difficult to imagine where all these numbers stand, so let’s put them into perspective a little bit. The largest British non-tabloid is The Daily Telegraph which published daily 901.238 copies in November 2006, while the news authority in the US, The New York Times, is printed in 1.120.420 copies on weekdays.

I’m no statistical guru and really have no idea how circulation, population and readership comparisons are made, but here’s a little experiment I’ve come up with. Before you begin ranting, yes, I do know about those three types of lies, nevertheless, I think this is fun, so please bear with me.

I took the number of people living in each of the three countries where the above mentioned newspapers are published and have divided that number by the circulation of each newspaper. And I have to say that the results absolutely stunned me. Here they are: The New York Times publishes one copy per 270 people (302.495.015 / 1.120.420), The Daily Telegraph one per 67 people (60.209.500 / 901.238), while Helsingin Sanomat publishes one newspaper per 12 people (5.310.000 / 426.117). Now I think that is quite telling and even though I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, it’s still difficult to wrap my mind around it.

If there are some of you out there smirking at my playing with numbers, here’s another calculation for you. Even if I take for instance USA Today with supposed circulation of 2.25 million and divide copies among the inhabitants of the US, 134 people would still need to line up for one copy of the paper each day, which I think you would agree wouldn’t make it a very practical daily paper. Similarly goes for the British The Sun, which is supposedly one of the papers with the highest circulation in the world and has been as of June 2007 published in whopping 3 million copies a day, but for which in Britain 20 people would end up queueing each day. And The Sun really is only ambulance, celebrity and scandal chasing tabloid, all of which are characteristics to disqualify it outright from our otherwise serious reading.

And this is not all. All these newspapers, but Helsingin Sanomat, are published in English language which is by some estimates spoken by roughly 1 billion people today. While if I estimate the potential readership of Helsingin Sanomat at around 6 million, I would probably be grossly exaggerating. So this even further brings the population to circulation ratio of this Finnish newspaper at odds.

Which brings me to my final point. Even if I disregard all the circulation statistics and my little number experiment above, there is the everyday reality by which I am surrounded. Finns of all ages are very passionate about reading. This might be just my subjective feeling, but I cannot not mention that I have never anywhere before seen so many people reading so enthusiastically practically everywhere.

After all, what is most telling and important of all is how well people are informed. One of the most common questions I am asked is where I come from. So a couple of years ago when I came to Finland, I was startled every time when as I was about to begin explaining which city in Slovenia I came from, people would ask before I could tell: “Now, do you come from Ljubljana or from Maribor?”, citing the two largest cities in Slovenia. Which is, sad to say, but nevertheless a stark difference from my experience in the US from the mid-1990s where after telling people that I came from Slovenia, very common replies would be “Well you must have traveled a long time from Siberia” or “So how is life in Somalia these days.” Not to mention that I often had to explain that yes, we do have electricity and cars too, and that I know what a microwave oven is.

Mladen