Dagbladet

What is Dagbladet?

Dagbladet is a national Norwegian daily newspaper and news site, published in Oslo. Founded in 1869 as an organ of radical liberal opposition, it moved through the twentieth century into a popular newspaper built on crime reporting, culture and features, and adopted tabloid format in 1983. It was owned by Berner Media Holding until June 2013, when it was acquired by Aller Media AS, part of the Danish Aller group, which remains its owner.^[1] [2]

Its sport is published under its own section front at dagbladet.no/sport, on the same domain as the rest of the paper, and is carried on the paid tier Dagbladet Pluss as well as on the free site.^[3] [4] Unlike its Schibsted-owned rival, Dagbladet takes its sports reporting from its own staff rather than from another newspaper's agency service, which makes it one of two Oslo tabloids with an independent national sports desk.

What does Dagbladet cover?

Dagbladet's sport front is dominated by football, domestic and English, alongside winter sport and the national teams; its September 2026 front carried Premier League results and Norwegian club and international football side by side.^[3] The desk's characteristic output is commentary, interviews and news reporting around competitions rather than live rights coverage: Dagbladet holds no broadcast rights of its own, and its sport reaches readers as text, photography and video on dagbladet.no.^[3]

The paper's wider editorial identity is a general one — news, politics, culture, crime and consumer journalism — and sport sits inside it as one of several large departments rather than as the paper's defining subject.^[1] Coverage of Norwegian winter-sport athletes, Norwegian footballers abroad and the governance disputes of Norwegian sports federations is where the desk is most visible, and it runs a rolling live sports service alongside the section front.^[3]

What are Dagbladet's reach and standing?

Kantar Media's Forbruker og Media measurement, published for the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association as the official daily digital reach figures, recorded 872,000 daily digital users for Dagbladet in the fourth quarter of 2025 — fourth among Norwegian news brands behind VG, NRK and TV 2, and ahead of Nettavisen at 457,000 and Aftenposten at 353,000.^[5] Circulation for the second half of 2025 was reported at 79,000, of which 66,700 was the digital Dagbladet Pluss edition and 12,300 print.^[4]

Medietilsynet's media diversity report published in January 2026 recorded Dagbladet, under Aller Media, as accounting for 9.2 per cent of national newspaper circulation in 2024, the third-largest, after Schibsted and DN Media Group, in a market where Amedia, Schibsted and Polaris Media together accounted for 74.5 per cent of total newspaper circulation.^[6]

Those figures place Dagbladet among the four news brands in Norway whose daily audience is measured in the high hundreds of thousands, and it is one of only two national tabloids in the country.^[5] Its position is a digital one: the reported circulation is now overwhelmingly the Dagbladet Pluss subscription rather than the printed paper, while the free site carries the larger daily audience.^[4]

Since when?

Dagbladet was founded in 1869. Its long ownership by the Berner family interests ended in June 2013 with the sale to Aller Media AS; the transaction was cleared by the Norwegian competition authorities that year.^[1] [2] The switch to tabloid format came in 1983, accompanied by internal conflict, and the paper's centre of gravity has since moved from print to the digital editions: by the second half of 2025 more than four-fifths of its reported circulation was the Dagbladet Pluss subscription rather than the printed paper.^[1] [4]

Editorial leadership changed in 2026, when Gunnar Stavrum — previously the responsible editor of Nettavisen from 2003 — became editor of Dagbladet.^[1] [7] The sports desk has been a continuous department across those changes, and remained one when a competing national daily folded its own sports department into its news desk in February 2025.^[8]

Why does Dagbladet matter in Norway's sport?

Norway has two national tabloids with their own sports desks, and Dagbladet is the second. That matters structurally rather than only by volume: since 2020 VG has supplied sport to the main Schibsted and Polaris subscription dailies, and in February 2025 Aftenposten merged its sports department into its breaking-news desk, with its editor stating there would be less sport signed by Aftenposten's own journalists.^[8] [9] Dagbladet's desk is one of the few remaining independent national sources of Norwegian sports reporting outside the broadcasters.

Its audience supports that role: 872,000 daily digital users in Kantar's Q4 2025 measurement is a reach larger than that of any Norwegian newspaper except VG.^[5] For a Norwegian athlete, coverage in Dagbladet is a second, separately sourced national record of a performance, rather than a republication of the same agency copy.^[3] The paper also reaches a wide audience without a subscription barrier on its free site, while carrying its longer sports writing on the paid Dagbladet Pluss tier.^[4]