The digital shift and syntactic complexity: Mean sentence length in Finnish news journalism

Abstract This article examines the observed increase in mean sentence length in Finnish-language news media in the context of changes in the media ecosystem after 2010. The phenomenon is analyzed against two competing explanations: the expansion of interpretative or analytical practices in journalism, and the acceleration of editing processes. The results lend support to both explanations and demonstrate how their combined effect has increased the syntactic complexity of Finnish-language news by roughly 20 % over just a decade. While offering substantial evidence for the growing prominence of interpretative journalism in core news reporting, the study also provides a unique perspective on how shifting socio-economic conditions can place even well-established genres in a state of linguistic dynamism. Given the ongoing global debate about the role of news media in democratic societies, the finding that rising syntactic complexity reduces accessibility for an increasing share of the population marks a significant development.