Making News Media Ownership Chains Transparent by Relational Databases

Abstract The multi-tiered shareholder identification and registration systems are dominant within the European Union member States, but in the Nordic countries, the holding structure is based on a direct holding model. Share registers of all listed companies are public, so basically, anyone may have a full outlook on the corporate ownership structure whenever they want. However, even the Nordic corporate governance model allows you to hide your ownership from public scrutiny by using other companies, most preferably unlisted ones, as intermediaries. The more complicated the chain of intermediaries, the more difficult it is to understand the ownership pattern and level of ownership concentration, which is especially important when evaluating the diversity and functioning of the news media markets. This is why maximum transparency requires not only public share registers but also a structural database, which has also been designed to show the full chain of direct and indirect ownership of each legal owner. This article analyses the relational database model developed for studying and presenting multilevel direct and indirect ownership structures of European news media in the first phase of the Euromedia Ownership Monitor project funded by the European Union.