Author: Sofia Karlsson Title: When Advertising and Journalism Meet Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish This bachelor thesis consists of a historical analysis of the collaborations between advertisers and editors, which led to the increasingly common phenomenon known as “sponsored articles”, or “advertorials”. From the first known printed ad in Sweden in 1645 to the present day, journalism and advertisement are shown to have been evolving mutually. This co-dependence between the two is demonstrated and scrutinized in this study to provide a more in depth understanding of the nature of their relationship. Through the presentation of historical facts, interviews, and background research, an attempt was made to provide both a historical and a current depiction of the state of affairs between Swedish magazines and advertisements within them. Furthermore, it was of interest to investigate the opinion of the professionals involved in the creation and publishing of said advertorials. Following this logic, the study also brushes on the attempts made to minimize advertisers’ control over the freedom of media, as well as possible ethical implications to journalism itself, which derive from these sponsored articles. The development of this thesis was underpinned by three main research questions. They were: How has the collaboration between editorial and advertisement come to be? How do the collaborations between editorial and advertisement look today? How do professionals view editorial collaborations today? Data collected suggests a few points of interest. The first one being that the extinction of the agency formerly responsible for controlling sponsored ads has shifted the responsibility of overseeing text commercial boundaries to editors. Another finding is that sponsored ads are directly related to the economy, seeing as most media depends on advertising money to function. Harsher economies make the number of newsreaders plummet, which draws advertisers away. In attempts to re-attract them, newspapers and magazines have begun utilizing new strategies, such as sponsored ads. Moreover, despite studies demonstrating how nearly 60 percent of newsreaders fail to see advertorials as ads, editors insist there is a clear distinction between ads and editorial products. Additionally, editors claim that because of the fact that the advertorials are not written by the editorial staff itself, they are not overstepping journalistic ethical boundaries.

This study has focused on the scholarships given by the two organizations Publicistklubben and Svenska journalistförbundet between 1999-2013. What type of journalism do they support and in which way? The media sector and the labour market for journalists have undergone dramatic changes since the mid-90s. The media companies have reduced their staff and more people are becoming freelances. It’s a shifting landscape and one of the aims for the study is to understand what role this two associations has taken and will take in the future. We found that women were getting almost 60% of the scholarships and 60% of the total sum but that some subjects are still gender marked. The study also showed that nearly 60% of the scholarships are given for university courses, internships and education.

This thesis is a comparative study of photo journalism in different platforms, online versus printed newspapers. The sample used consists of four Swedish newspapers: Gefle Dagblad, Norrköpings Tidningar, Nerikes Allehanda and Borås Tidning. The digital media landscape and the adaptation of news-matter to match different platforms have entailed both possibilities and limitations. One possibility is to offer a diversified photo content in different media outlets and to make use of the features of online platforms in terms of interactivity and the potential to include more material. The limitations constitute of a more formatted layout and a high work rate, increasing the individual workload for journalists. The purpose of this thesis is to research how the possibilities and limitations of multi-platform publishing have affected photo journalism. The photo content of 599 news articles, both online and printed versions, have been analyzed in order to compare the difference between the two platforms. Three main areas have been compared: space, variation and origin. The study shows that the mentioned areas of photo journalism, to some extent, differ between the two platforms – printed newspaper and online. However, the difference is small. The newspapers in this study do not vary the photo content on different platforms to a large extent, even though it could encourage people to continue to read articles both online and in the printed newspaper. The articles online contain more photos on average. At the same time, the share of articles containing a photo is higher on the online platform compared to the printed newspaper. However, one of four articles does not contain a photo at all, which is notable since previous research shows that the use of photos generally increase reading. The online articles in the sample only include two types of multimedia elements, slideshows and moving pictures. One or both of these elements are used in 20 percent of all articles in the sample. Again, this shows that the potential of the online platform is not fully utilized. Above all, we believe that photo journalism could benefit from a higher use of moving pictures since this element is best at conveying feelings.

Bachelor’s Thesis in Journalism Title: One Hundred Years of Swedishness. A Study of Vidi, Den Svenske Nationalsocialisten, Nydemokraten and SD-kuriren Authors: Nils Gruvebäck and Rebecca Lundberg Academic term and year: Spring term 2015 Department: Journalism, Media and Communication Supervisor: Tomas Andersson Odén Examiner: Mathias A. Färdigh During the last two decades nationalist movements have mobilized throughout Europe. In Sweden the growing party is called the Sweden Democrats. During these years they have been accused of having a racist agenda, but since 2005 when Jimmy Åkesson became leader of the party, they have changed their logotype from a burning torch to a blue and yellow hepatica, their popularity has grown and they have tried to dissociate themselves from their rightwing past. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how nationalist movements in Sweden have developed during the last one hundred years. By starting with Vidi, an antisemitic newspaper from 1914, moving through the 1930’s and the Nazi party National Socialist Worker’s Party, to 1994 and the populist party New Democrats and the Sweden Democrats 2014 we want to see how these parties differ from one another – and what they have in common. By using the ECA-method (Ethnographic Content Analysis) we are exploring how swedishness is portrayed and constructed in four nationalist magazines associated to these movements: Vidi, Den Svenske Nationalsocialisten, Nydemokraten and SD-kuriren. Through a postcolonial perspective we investigate how the idea of Swedishness changes throughout the years, in relation to how the idea of the other changes. We see how the idea of Swedishness is created by how the other is portrayed, and how the two are in one way symbiotic and get meaning from one another. We also examine how media is portrayed in these magazines. In a Swedish nationalist discourse it is not unusual to accuse media for censorship, lies and “Swedish hostility”. As this study will show, the idea of Swedish hostility was vital already in 1914.

Swedish sports journalism are often criticized of giving too much attention to teams from big cities in general, and particularly to teams from Stockholm. It´s also a given in sports journalism that a good performance, like a victory in an import game, should result in some media attention. But what happens when these two criteria is opposed against each other? What is most important according to Swedish sports writers; the team from the big city or the winning team? We made a quantitative content analysis on the last ten seasons, 2005 – 2014, of the top Swedish football league, Allsvenskan. But our interest was not to examine every match; our analysis is based on every match where the big city team has lost to a smaller team. During these ten seasons 241 games were played where a smaller team wins against a big city team. We have studied Aftonbladets main article from all these games and, with help from certain theoretical tools, been deciding which team has got the main role in the article. We have been studying the headlines of the articles and which team that it is mainly referring to. Adding to this we’ve also been studying who is quoted in the entrance of the article. We have been analyzing the article picture to decide which team has the main role in it. We have also decided if the article is about one specific person or about the team. By comparing our results with older studies we can say that Aftonbladet gives losing big city teams much more attention than other losing teams. Almost more than half of the headlines focuses on the losing big city team. That number should be put in comparison to older studies saying that Aftonbladet focuses on the winning team in 79 per cent of the main articles. It seems that Aftonbladet thinks it´s at least as important to be a big city club as it is to win the game. We can also show that it´s more common that an article has a one-person-angle when it´s focused on the winning smaller team. It seems that a smaller team depends more on having big name players in their squad to get attention than big city teams have. Being located close to Aftonbladets office in Stockholm is a factor that seems to be important if you are a smaller team and wants attention. The teams that have the toughest time to get attention are located far from Stockholm. They have quite the same results during the last ten seasons as many teams closer to Stockholm but doesn´t get close to the same amount of attention. We can also show that a team that has been successful over a certain amount of time has a better chance of getting media attention, regardless where in Sweden they are located. It seems though that the smaller team has to have been successful in the later years. It doesn´t seem to be enough to have won the league two times in the last 20 years to get attention.