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.

Title: ”Varför går man inte hårdare fram? – En studie i krigsorienterad journalistik av Public Service från Ukrainakonflikten” Authors: Cemil Arikan, Staffan Florén Sandberg and Karl Henrik Olsson Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies, Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) Gothenburg University Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Mathias Färdigh, JMG, Gothenburg University Pages/words: 48 pages/16701 words Purpose: The main purpose of the paper was to examine if and to what extent the conflict coverage of two Swedish public service news programmes from the ongoing Ukrainian conflict could be said to orientate towards either war or peace journalism. Method: Quantitative and qualitative content analysis Procedure: News broadcasts from Rapport 19:30 and Dagens Eko kvart-i-fem, covering the Ukrainian conflict, over a period of two months, were analyzed from the normative perspective of Johan Galtung’s peace journalism theory and Wilhelm Kempf’s theory of war and peace discourse. Results: Both Rapport and Dagens Eko were found orientating towards war journalism. Reports were given, in a great extent, to events of violence and verbal threats. The conflict was largely conceptualized and constructed as a competitive struggle between Russia on the one side and Ukraine with its western allies on the other.

Title: Two sides of the same coin. A quantative content analysis of how Swedish daily press frames begging Authors: Mirjam Hultin, Linda Moström & Caroline Widenheim Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies Location: Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) University of Gothenburg Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Britt Börjesson, JMG, University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 45 (excluding appendix) Background: During the late twentieth century, there was a debate in the daily press concerning the increase of homeless and beggars in Stockholm. Voices arose wanting to make it illegal to beg, especially in the subways. Today, the issue is again up for debate now focusing on the increase of migrants from poor countries of the European Union. Purpose: The main purpose is to examine how the phenomena beggary is portrayed in the daily press. We aimed to make a comparison between two periods, 1997-2000 and 2007-2013, and between different newspapers. Method: A quantitative content analysis of four major Swedish newspapers using a digital archive and a search string designed to sort out all articles concerning beggars in Sweden. A total of 352 articles from four major newspapers from the first and the second period were coded and analysed. Results: In our compared periods of time, we met two different portrayals of people begging and beggary. The person who is begging is in most cases being talked about and may rarely be heard, while as politicians and/or office holders are most frequent as main agents. In the nineties, the person begging is (implicitly) swedish, while during the 21st century, half of the articles presents the “beggar” to be from Romania. The most common is to not state a cause to the beggary, but when they did in the nineties the most common was homelessness, addiction and poverty. In the 21st century, the most common cause is poverty, though it is interesting that coercion and discrimination never was mentioned in the nineties, while today it’s mentioned frequently.

Authors: Agnes Källén & Amanda Redin Title: Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of Pages: 39 With this study we aimed to answer the following questions: has the amount of brand exposure on the Tv4 show “Nyhetsmorgon” increased between the years 2008 and 2013? And if so, how can the increase be explained by well-recognized research in the field? The media industry is changing toward an increasingly commercial content. In television, this change is mainly caused by the growth in shows watched on the web and through time shift, which is the act of watching something on a digital video recorder, or DVR. This gives the viewer the possibility to fast forward through the commercial breaks, and therefore forces the networks as well as the advertizer to find new ways to reach consumers. Hence the plausible growth in product placement and brand exposure. A Swedish new radio and tv law that came into effect in 2010, regulated the previously unregulated area of product placement, which adds an interesting paradox to our above stated questions. Our findings were that the brand exposure indeed had increased, but only slightly. The difference in registered brand exposures was shown to only be about 6.5 procent. However, other findings were that the number of brand exposures increased on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, as to prepare the viewers for potential purchases during the weekend. Other patterns within the brand exposures were found as well, for example that most exposures were found to be considered as “neutral”, portraying the brand neither positively nor negatively. All findings were then connected to and explained by established research theories.

The world today is not an equal place. We see children starve, people being discriminated and women’s rights being neglected. The media coverage of women’s sports is no exception. In this study we have explored the difference between men’s and women’s media coverage in Swedish sports journalism. This has been done by using quantitative method together with interviews in order to define why the coverage is the way it is. Our theoretical points of departure are gender theories, identification theory and the news value theories gatekeeping and agenda setting. A central part of our study has been to analyze which factors determine how much space women’s sports get in Swedish media today and if it’s possible to change these. Our main research questions have been: – How is the space divided between men’s sports and women’s sports in SVT, TV4, Sportbladet and Sportexpressen? – Why is the space divided the way it is? We found that Swedish media covers women’s sports much less than men’s sports. In general, men’s sports take 80 percent of the media coverage and women’s sports take the remaining 20.The reasons for this could be the lack of female sport journalists, the economic interests of media and/or the overall public interest in women’s sports. These factors depend on each other. Therefor we have come to the conclusion that we need more women in the sports journalism field in Sweden, both as reporters and on the executive posts to make sports and sports media coverage more equal.