The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the work situation for temporary workers within the field of journalism. During the past decade, influential external forces such as commercialization, new technologies and increased competition have brought great changes within the industry. As a result, employers value flexibility of manpower, not least to reduce cost, where the flexible employee is usually leased by the media company from a manpower company. Today it is a normal practice with manpower companies and this way of hourly paid form of employment. Although the temporary worker can sometimes benefit from this kind of employment, there are also significant setbacks like job insecurity. The insecurity has an impact on leased journalists to work under deficient conditions with incapability to plan their free-time, lower wages compared to permanent employees, lack of competence development. Additionally, the leased journalists are more likely to fail in their social relations at job. Hence, factors like abovementioned causes stress and may affect the employee’s psychological wellbeing negatively. As a consequence, the quality of work produced by future increasingly leased journalists may be negatively impacted, which can have effects of the democracy. Job insecurity is a complex phenomena to measure, however by identifying four main themes this study seeks to provide a pervasive picture on job insecurity for leased journalists. The themes were investigated through the method of conversation analysis, resulting in six semi-structured interviews with temporary workers from staffing companies. The material was then transcribed and interpreted hermeneutically. This study finds a correlation between shorter assignments and stress. The leased journalists are more prone to feel stressed when they are changing work with short intervals of time. Hence, this study contributes to recent research within the same field and consolidates the drawbacks for leased employees.

Authors: Jessica Johansson & Sofia Kristiansen Title: And the winner is… Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: (34) In this study the winners of Sweden’s most prestigious journalism award Stora journalistpriset are characterized in the search for the dominant award winner. To find the dominant award winner we used a quantitative method, where we gathered information about the previous winners between the years of 1966-2014. Gender, age at the time of the award, whether they won individually or in groups, their employer at the time of the award, subject of the winning material and where it was first published, were the variables. A total of 268 award winners were characterized from these variables and a statistic analysis were made. The statistic analysis showed that there has been a dominant group among the award winners. Between the years of 1966-2014 the typical award winner was a man between 31-40 years old, who worked individually for public service. The winning material was mainly published in the printed press. The award was handed out mainly for ones journalistic attributes. Although in the more recent years the dominant group is losing ground. It is now insignificant what gender the journalists have, if they work individually or in a group and in what form their material is published. Their age however is unchanged, it is still the journalists in the ages of 31-40 who exceedingly wins the awards. The subject of the winning material differs whether you are male or female. Females tend to be awarded for subjects coded as gender-neutral, such as their journalistic attributes, environment, internet-related, creation/restruction of media and other. Males however went from being awarded for gender-neutral subjects to being awarded for traditionally male subjects, such as politics, crime, war, catastrophe and accidents, economics, sports, science, technology and work. The employer matters for the journalists working in broadcasting media and in printed press. For a higher chance of winning the journalists working in broadcasting media should be employed by public service. For the journalists in printed press it is highly likely to win if they are employed by Bonnier.

This study aims to map out the degree of mediatization present in the communication between Swedish public service journalists and politicians in the 2014 election campaign. In doing so we chose to look at the presence of media logic in their communication with each other. Specifically, we have used the pre-election interviews with the party leaders from Sweden’s two biggest parties. Furthermore, we have chosen to focus on Sveriges Radio, the Swedish public service radio company. Sveriges Radio concists of four different radio channels, of which we have chosen to focus on the channels P1 and P3, the first having a somewhat more ”serious” profile, focused on producing quality news and other journalistic products, while P3 is leaning towards a younger audience and describes its own work as ”soft, humorous and important radio”, mixed with music and other forms of entertainment. Both channels produced interviews with the party leaders, which then became our objects of study. The study is based on a quantitive content analysis method. Based on earlier academic studies and theory, we chosen a certain numbers of possible indicators of media logic, hoping to make visible the degree of mediatization, and the difference between the two channels. One of the indicators that we chose to focus on was the accomodation between the topics of discussion within the interview and the topics prioritized in the election manifestos of the parties. In doing so, we of course had to study the manifestos as well, which resulted in a separate quantitive content analysis, which we later compared to that of the interviews. The results of the study showed that a certain presence of media logic and indicated that the party logic was less present in both radio channels. Comparing the two radio channels and their programs, our indicators showed a tendency in P3 leaning more towards media logic, than we did in P1. It shall be noted that these results could be interpreted in other ways. The interpretation made by us is thus based solely on the earlier academic studies that we have managed to find.

Title: ”I kolonialismens fotspår” Author: Erik Holm Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies, Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) Gothenburg University Supervisor: Jan Strid, JMG, Gothenburg University Pages/words: 26 pages/10 332 words Purpose: The purpose was to examine how independent the South China Morning Post reports on issues, particularly during the 2014 protests, if they are influenced by the western media or mainland China, to what degree censorship occurs and if their opinions reflect the opinions of the Hong Kong citizens. Method: Argument analysis and motive analysis Procedure: 24 articles from the period 26/9-­10/10 was analyzed and sorted by what side they were argumenting in favor of and the nature of the arguments. The arguments were also analyzed further to differentiate words that meant different things in specific situations. Results: The thesis showed that, compared to western and Chinese media, the Hong Kong press reports rather equal for both sides of the reform argument and does a big effort to keep it that way, inviting guest writers. The fact that more writers are writing in favor of the reform, even though the Hong Kong citizens generally are pro-­democracy, is explained by the nature of the arguments. The writers’ arguments are often economic-­oriented. The older generation generally priorities the economic growth, a remaining value from the days of colonialization. So in a way the newspaper’s articles does reflect the majority of the older generation of Hong Kong. At the same time a few factors indicates some kind of censorship, like an article against democracy without an author and less articles criticizing the Chinese government, than before the demonstration and the presence of foreign media.

Title: “…baby, I´m the worrying kind.” – A quantitative analysis of the relation between TV news consumption and worry of crime. Authors: Maria Askerfjord Sundeby and Jennifer Rochette Year: Autumn 2014 Level: Bachelor degree Department: Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, Göteborgs universitet. Supervisor: Adam Shehata Summary: The aim of this thesis is to analyze the relations between worry of crime, both societal and personal, and consumption of news from the Swedish TV-channels SVT (public service) and TV4 (commercial). The cultivation theory claims that it is just the amount of TV that shows an effect on consumers and their perception of reality, like for example the mean world syndrome. But the theory has been criticized for not considering the possible effects that are actually related to other variables. These variables have weakened or totally eliminated the effects, previously explained by TV, in later control studies of the cultivation theory. In our study we take a few control variables in to consideration, and we only focus on the effect that a high TV news consumption has on the worry of crime. The art of storytelling is also a part of the cultivation theory that we use, mostly to point out how much easier it is today, especially through TV, to spread a story, or as the cultivation theory calls it, a message. The results are in line with previous research on the impact of TV. Our results show a significant relation between a high consumption of TV news and the worry of crime, both societal and personal. The effect of high consumption of TV news is stronger then all of the control variables except one where gender has a stronger effect on worry of crime, on a personal level. The results also show that the public service channels SVT has the strongest relations and effects on its consumers.

Title: Under the surface – Fredrik Reinfeldt and Stefan Löfven in a comparative photo study Authors: Jon Demred, Fanny Wijk & Olivia Wikström Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 39 This thesis compares how Stefan Löfven was being portrayed in Swedish media the week after the general election 2014 with how Fredrik Reinfeldt was portrayed in the first week after 2006’s general election. There has been made a lot of research on how politicians are portrayed in the media, but most of the research focus on text portrayal. This thesis focus on something different, it compares how the two “winners” were portrayed in news photos. A semiotic approach was used to analyse news images in the newspapers Aftonbladet, Expressen, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. It was important to not only look at the pictures, but also the outer context, i.e the headlines, had to be analysed to come to any conclusions. Fredrik Reinfeldt was portrayed more positive and more as a winner than Stefan Löfven was. This was probably due to the different political situations between the elections. The portrayals, however, had not much to do with the photos themselves, rather the headlines. The analysis shows that the emotions both “winners” expressed in the photos were quite similar. The main difference between how they were portrayed laid not in the pictures but in the outer context. The final conclusion is that even though pictures take up a lot of space in newspapers, they still are subordinate to text.

Today most people are in agreement that the media industry is in crisis. Many newsrooms cut down on staff. At the same time the PR industry is growing. We wanted to research if this could affect the unbiased and independent news in our news media today. Today’s newsrooms receive a lot of press releases every day. How many of these reach the published news? Our main purpose was to study the origin of the news published in four different media. To study how many of the news that came from press releases and learn the opinion about press releases of each news editor, and if they treat different senders in different ways. We examined four different media: one daily newspaper, one tabloid, one local radio sta-tion and one regional television newscast. This we did by examine two days of their news. To find out the source in a reliable way we called the people appearing in the article and not just the reporter. We also interviewed the news editor of each media. Our results show that our theory on cutting down staff would affect the use of press releas-es did not correlate with the reality. According to our study the news editors and news-rooms are mostly positive towards press releases. They use them as any other tip or source. However they all agree that, since they get so many, it takes a lot of their time to sort them all out. Although all editors also agree that they don’t rely on getting news from press re-leases, the result shows otherwise. Press releases seem to be a daily part of the newsrooms, at least the two days we examined. Our result also shows that there is a difference in usage of press releases between the different media organizations, and the press releases that are mostly used come from authorities and not from profit-driven companies. Our study excludes sports and culture, because we wanted to focus on the most unbiased part of the news. If these had not been excluded the result would probably have been very different.

Title: ”världens mest fruktade terrororganisation” en diskursanalys av rapporteringen om Islamiska Staten Author: Martin Landin Subject: Undergraduate research paper in Journalism studies, Dept. Of Journalism, media and communication (JMG) Gothenburg University Term: Autumn 2014 Supervisor: Gabriella Sandstig, JMG Gothenburg Pages/words: 34/16295 Purpose: The purpose is to examine the discourses that characterize the news about the Islamic state (IS) in Swedish newspapers, and to study how these discourses are expressed. Method: Critical Discourse Analysis Procedure: 10 articles from Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet were analysed through Critical Discourse Analysis. Results: The analysed articles shows tendencies of orientalist discourse and of a propagandistic discourse which is a part of war journalism.