Tyckonomins tidsålder

News media has gone through a lot of changes over the last few decades; commercialization, digitalization, and countless technological advances which all have led to new ways of acquiring and reading news. Research has also shown that news media has experienced increasing homogenization, meaning that news articles in competing newspapers look more and more alike when it comes to content. But in newspapers and magazines today you can not only find news articles, but also different kinds of opinion pieces such as columns, editorials, commentaries and analyses. These help newspapers create a more personal contact with their readers, and if the content of news articles has changed this might be true for opinion pieces as well. This study focuses on examining columns of different genres and subjects in Sweden’s two biggest evening papers Aftonbladet and Expressen the years 1994, 2005 and 2016. The study raises three questions: Which column genres exist and how common are they? Which are the most frequently written about subjects, and in what way has that changed over time? Has the content characteristics of columns changed over time in terms of tone, style, and interplay between writer, text and reader – and if so, in what way? A quantity of over 300 columns has been analysed through a method of quantitative text analysis, and then 35 of these columns has been analysed with the method of content analysis.

Keywords: columns, news content, news, public opinion, public sphere, homogenization.