Everything is uncertain : representations of Lapland tourism industry in Helsingin Sanomat during the first Covid-19 pandemic year

Abstract

When the year 2019 was coming to an end, there were “viral pneumonia cases” in Wuhan, China. As we know now, it was not pneumonia, but something that changed the everyday lives of billions of people. In the beginning of 2020, the disease was named Covid-19, and on March 11th, 2020, it was already declared as a pandemic. The global world is so well-connected that a virus is rapidly spread around the planet. The travelling people transported the Covid-19 everywhere, but it was, however, the tourism industry that was hit very hard when the countries closed their borders, and restrictions and quarantines became a part of everyday life.

The tourism industry in Finland is said to have two locomotives, the first being Helsinki and the second being the region of Lapland. Even though the absolute number of tourists is higher in an urban area, the importance of tourism is more visible and vital in a more peripheric area, like in Lapland in Northern Finland. The tourism industry in the Finnish Lapland grew fast in 2010s, but in 2020, the whole tourism industry in Lapland was seen in a totally different light than in the previous year when it was breaking records. Suddenly, there was not anymore a continuous flow of international tourists, and that also affected the way how Lapland tourism was represented in the news.

The aim of this thesis is to look for how Lapland tourism was represented in the domestic news articles in the first 12 months of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is done by utilizing qualitative databased content analysis. The underlying paradigm of this study is social constructionism which challenges the idea of knowledge being objective and argues that our ways of understanding the world are constructed socially. The news media is one of the arenas where the public discussion is taking place.

The research data consists of 27 domestic news articles from Helsingin Sanomat’s online version. The analysis highlights four themes related to how the tourism industry in Lapland was represented in the research data: “Foreign–domestic comparisons”, “Changed reality”, “Complex situation”, and “Different future”. Through these themes the analysis illustrates how Lapland tourism was represented as an industry which was built for the needs of large numbers of international tourists, but which was not resilient in the time when the flow of foreign visitors suddenly stopped.