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.

Authors: Johannes Andersson, Kim Karlsson and Daniel Sandström Title: The development of crime reporting Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 59 Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how the Swedish crime reporting has changed over time. Question at issue: How do the Swedish newspapers describe the criminality? In what way do the Swedish newspaper describe the offenders in crime-related articles? How has the Swedish crime reporting changed over time? Method and material: Quantitative content analysis of the two newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Göteborgs-Posten. Main result: The Swedish newspaper’s way of describing the criminality has changed over time. During the investigated period of time the frequency of crime reports in the editorial material has dropped. In 2010 the crime report consisted mainly of crime reports regarding offence against the person. That was not the case in 1990. In some ways the newspapers are restrictive in what they are writing and in some ways they are not. Although the Swedish rules of press ethics say to be restrictive describing an offender’s gender or age the newspapers are not. Writing about the ethnicity of an offender is on the other hand very uncommon.

Discussions of structural racism has now moved to the forefront of the Swedish society, and many researchers have sought to understand what form it takes, how it is manifested, how it is exploited and challenged. At the core of this debate we find the media, and its logic embedded with mechanisms of simplification and polarization. Media is our key source of knowledge and information, why it also affects our norms, beliefs and preconceptions. Media thus has the power to mediate, amplify or challenge how we conceptualize the world, and subsequently our (unconscious) racist beliefs. To investigate how media content is influenced by underlying colonial or racist assumptions and stereotypes thus becomes a way to investigate our understanding of reality. In accordance with postcolonial thought, structural and symbolic racism is embedded in language and hidden in images, and surface in the form of domination and feminization, and the portrayal of the subaltern ‘Other’ as passive and irrational. This paper thus departs from postcolonial theory and media logic to undercover hidden patterns of structural, symbolic and historically contingent racism in one of Sweden’s most prominent in-depth foreign TV-magazines, namely Korrespondenterna. Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper explores to what extent racist and colonial stereotypes are reproduced and/or challenged in Korrespondenterna’s representation of Sub-Saharan Africa. In line with postcolonial theory it is found that historically contingent racialized stereotypes are prevalent in Korrespondenterna, and that tendencies of portraying Africa and Africans as passive, feminine and irrational are prevailing. It is thus argued that media logic, imbedded with mechanisms of simplification, polarization and intensification, contributes to the use of colonial stereotypes in media, and thus to the mediation of structural and symbolic racism.

About a year ago, Göteborgs-Posten, one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, decided it was unprofitable to continue producing their feature-style weekend magazine, Två Dagar. Standing at a crossroads, not wanting to stop producing the weekend magazine altogether, they decided to outsource. Spoon Publishing AB, a content agency with strong ties to Göteborg, were assigned with taking over the production. Going forward, Spoon has taken over a majority of the responsibility for the conceptual work and actual production, all with the main purpose of reducing cost and increasing efficiency. Normally Spoon does content marketing for a wide range of customers in an equally wide spectra of channels, from print to radio, television and web. The main purpose of this essay has been to investigate and establish whether the journalistic integrity and quality has in fact been maintained despite the weekend magazine being outsourced. We have analyzed selected editions of the magazine, first and foremost in articles under the vignette fashion, using a qualitative method for content analysis, scrutinizing everything from the denotation of single words to the big picture. This specific vignette contains the most frequent contributions by in-house, or at least reappearing, journalists. Perusing the material in Två Dagar, we have come to the conclusion that the magazine has indeed retained its level of quality and still reflects the same core values as before being outsourced.

This study was made with the incentive to find out the view on advertorials in Swedish press today. Our exploration of advertorials refers not only to adverts that look like editorial texts, as per the definition in the oxford dictionaries, but also to ways that editorial texts use an advertorial style or language similar to adverts. We explored both these sides because we recognized that the existence of advertorials in press today has to do with material which is indistinctive in several ways, and to find out the views on this, we interviewed chief editors and publishers on six local daily newspapers in Västra Götaland, Sweden. Our theories were based in the fact that the press finds itself working in a commercialized landscape, at the same time as journalism has a democratic role to uphold in society. We also considered that there used to be a committee against advertorials in Sweden called Textreklamkommittén, which was disbanded in 2005. That committee had a mandate to govern and try cases of advertorials in the press, but today, the only thing that journalists have to consider is a guideline of publishing matters. The central part of our study was therefore to find out what actual issues journalists have to consider in their daily work, as they are exposed to various forms of advertorials. After conducting the interviews, we asked four analytical questions to our material using the ECA-method of analysis. Those four questions were: What is viewed as advertorials today? In what ways can advertorials be an issue? Are advertorials an issue today? What has brought on the view with which advertorials are looked on today? What we found was that there seems to be a consensus amongst the journalists that we interviewed regarding what is considered to be advertorials. But despite this, they all differ in the ways that they work with and interpret the material. There is a difference in how the journalists work with advertorials given their economic situation, which is seen in relation to small and big newspapers. At the same time, they all realize that the presence of advertorials can threaten the credibility of the journalistic content. But despite this, there is a general belief between them, that a committee against advertorials no longer is needed.

In this study we have chosen to explore if there is still signs of gender typing in the two news programmes Rapport and Nyheterna. By using a quantitative survey as a method we have investigated if there are any differences between the sexes and their roles. The two main questions where: How does the representation look when it comes to the numbers of women and men? In what extension is the representation gender typed? Due to different theoretical points and former research we have seen that journalistic subject and gender often tends to go hand in hand. When it comes to other participants, such as subjects of interviews, earlier research has shown that experts most often are men. Whereas women often participate as ordinary people, such as mothers or students. Our theoretical point of views is the existing gender system, both in the society and media sphere. We also take departure in the media system and the fact that what we are fed with from the media also is the way we create our conception of the world. In our results we found that that there is a small difference in how many women and men that appears as reporters in these two news programmes. When it comes to interviewed people there is a slightly larger difference. In both cases men have the upper hand. When observing the results regarding gender and journalistic subjects we see that there are still differences in what journalists cover depending on gender. Also when it comes to subjects of interviews, they also tend to depend on gender. After all we can see that the gender system still remains. If not convincingly enough in the over all numbers of women and men participating, we see it in the field in which they appear. Therefore gender typing still appears to be a problem that has not yet been solved.

Authors: Nanna Isaksson and Fredrik Östberg Title: Who is the typical TV-host on Swedish television? Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 57 TV-hosts have a pivotal role in television. They are the link between the content of the show and its viewers. We didn’t find any relevant studies about TV-hosts in Sweden and decided to carry out a study that would tell us more about them as a group. The purpose with this study was to find the answer to the question: Who becomes a TV-host in Sweden today? By looking at the current TV-hosts through the eyes of a viewer we set out to try to construct the preferred Swedish TV-host. We used a quantitative content analysis on all the hosts on Swedish productions that aired during the month of November 2014. We did not include the regular news shows in our study, because we consider the role of a news anchor to be a field of its own and very different to the role of a TV-host. We used three main aspects for our analysis: gender, age and ethnic background that we applied on all the hosts, but we did this from a viewer’s perspective. We asked ourselves the question: How does this person appear to us as viewers? And then we categorized them through our aspects. TV is a visual medium, and whether you like to admit it or not you’re constantly judging TV-hosts and feel the need to voice your opinion on their performance. We used this method because we wanted to get to the core of what a TV-host is. If you analyze them through a viewer’s perspective you see what the people at the channels that appointed them as hosts want you to see. All in all we analyzed 112 TV-hosts. Some of the hosts in our study appeared more than once, because they were hosting more than one show that aired during the duration of our study. What we looked at was not the number of hosts but the number of roles as TV-hosts within the shows that was included in our study. What was important was to see what kind of person featured as a host, not who. We found out a lot. First of all almost half of the roles as host were occupied by people within the age group 40-49 years old. Female hosts were more common than male (53 percent) and only six percent of roles as host were somebody with a non- Scandinavian ethnic background. As we dived deeper into our numbers we looked at different genres. We found out that women are preferred as hosts in shows that were in the field of Society and facts (66 percent) whereas men were preferred in shows that were in the biggest of our genres, the field of Entertainment, leisure and culture. We looked at the hosts that featured during prime-time, which in Sweden occurs between 8pm and 10pm. In the shows that were broadcasted during prime-time male hosts (53 percent) were preferred to female hosts. We were getting closer to answering our main question. Both younger – 29 years or younger (two percent of the total amount of hosts) – and older hosts – 60 years old or older (four percent) – were marginalized in our study. They didn’t feature at all in certain areas. We could however conclude that young hosts tend to do shows that cater to young people and older hosts tend to do the same towards older people. What was the answer to our main question then? We concluded that the preferred Swedish TV-host is a male whose ethnic background is Scandinavian and is between 40-49 years old. This was largely down to the fact that men tended to be hosting the shows that had the highest ratings (the ones that were broadcasted during primetime) and that they occupied the majority of roles as host within Entertainment, leisure and culture – which was the largest genre of our study.