Kriminaljournalistikens utveckling

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.