”Varför är det så tyst från Tegnell för tillfället? Har han blivit sjuk?”

The purpose of this study is to analyze the live feed used on Aftonbladet’s website during the
corona pandemic and investigate how inviting the audience to participate with their own
content affects the crisis journalism. This will be done by quantitatively analyzing the
readers’ and journalists’ posts in Aftonbladet´s live feed about the corona pandemic that was
started on February 24th, 2020. The main point of the study is to find the answer to three
questions:

• How are the three classic journalistic ideals – to inform, explain and investigate –
reflected in Aftonbladet’s live feed about the corona pandemic?
• How is the audience’s participation in the live feed reflected?
• Does the content of the live feed change over time?

In order to answer the questions, and to understand our data, this article uses theories about
journalism and its role in the democratic society, media logic in traditional news and in social
media, gatekeeping, participant journalism and the media’s role during a crisis.

The results showed that information was the most prominent of the three classic journalistic
ideals in the live feed. However, this changed over the course of time. At the start of the live
feed the journalists published information almost exclusively, but as the pandemic went on,
they started to publish explaining posts in the same extent. Posts of investigating character
was however not published at all.

The audience´s participation followed the same pattern as the journalistic posts in the feed –
information was requested in the greatest extent, but explanation was increasingly requested
further into the pandemic. The study also showed that criticism from the audience increased
with time, mainly towards Aftonbladet and its news coverage.