A government that always looks well rested

Antero Laukkanen, an MP for Finland’s Christian Democrats, holds up his phone during parliamentary question time in Helsinki, 12 December 2020.

STT, Finland’s national news agency, has struggled for years to make its news and picture services financially viable. It now warns that those operations could end in March 2027. Before then, there is a question to answer: who will do the work of its picture agency, Lehtikuva?

A study published in 2025 put Lehtikuva’s client base at just under 40. Sanoma, Finland’s largest commercial media group and STT’s majority owner, has stopped using the service. It has plenty of its own photographers. Not every newsroom has the resources to make the same arrangements.

Sanoma explained its departure by arguing that general news is increasingly plentiful and that technology (read: AI) makes it more efficient to produce. In the company’s view, there will be less need for both news agencies and picture services in the future. It did not mention that the same might turn out to be true of large media groups.

Certainly, a press conference can be watched online, a speech transcribed by a machine and the resulting text summarised by AI. Someone still has to obtain the information, check the claims and ask about whatever the press release leaves out. Making information easier to process does not remove the need to gather it.

With news photography, this is particularly difficult to get around. Someone has to go there, wait, and perhaps look in a direction the organisers have not specifically recommended.

Lehtikuva has shared the cost of being there across many newsrooms. A photographer working in parliament or beside a football pitch serves several newspapers at once. If the service disappears, will each outlet send its own photographer instead? Unlikely.

The work can, of course, be commissioned from another picture agency or a freelancer. Photographs will still be available to anyone willing to pay for them. Newsrooms can also arrange to share coverage. As media ownership becomes more concentrated, that increasingly means collaborating with other titles in the same group.

The worry is about the assignments where nobody knows in advance what will happen. Not every day in the corridors of parliament produces a photograph that people will remember years later. The difficulty is knowing beforehand which day will. A major summit will probably attract plenty of photographers. For a smaller event, the organiser’s handout may do.

In August, Journalisti, Finland’s magazine for journalists, reported on a picture bank run by Superpesis, the top league of pesäpallo, or Finnish baseball. News outlets can use its match photographs free of charge. The danger is that, gradually, what gets photographed becomes increasingly dependent on who wants to be seen.

In 2024, I wrote about a photograph released by Finland’s Ministry of Defence. It appeared to show the defence minister, Antti Häkkänen, joining a remote NATO meeting on a landline telephone. A model F-35 fighter jet sat on his desk. In the background was an image of Marshal Mannerheim, Finland’s wartime commander-in-chief. All the right national security props were in place. The photograph was months old.

A more serious reminder came in 2016, when the Prime Minister’s Office tried to prevent the publication of photographs by Sakari Piippo, who had worked there as a photographer. The government’s communications director, Markku Mantila, felt that the pictures made their subjects look, among other things, shabby and tired.

A tired minister is a problem for public relations. Not for journalism.

Piippo’s case also shows that the issue is not the photographers’ ability. Good photographs can be taken, but the decision to publish rests with an organisation that has its own interests to protect. By the time a newsroom opens a ministry’s picture folder, the first selection has already been made on its behalf.

Even a free photograph has been paid for by someone. He who pays the piper…

These choices also become part of the historical record. If more and more of the present is recorded in pictures approved by the people in them, future archives may suggest that Finland’s government was remarkably well rested.

There is also the question of what happens to the decades of photographs already in Lehtikuva’s archive. Perhaps a Finnish media group or an international picture agency will buy it. But the Finnish media’s record of looking after its own archives offers little reassurance.

In 2021, Journalisti reported that the number of information specialists working in Finnish media had fallen from more than 80 in 2012 to 22. How many are left in 2026? The same article described photographer Ulla-Maija Svärd trying to find her life’s work: the pictures she had taken for Sanoma’s magazines. The photographs might still have been in storage, but inadequate records made finding them almost impossible.

Perhaps an AI company will take an interest in Lehtikuva’s archive instead. Licensing photographs to train image generators is a growing business: Shutterstock, for instance, has supplied material to OpenAI. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, bought millions of printed books, digitised them and destroyed the paper originals.

There would be something fitting about that. There is no money to photograph reality, but there is money to imitate it convincingly.