”Vem har skrivit den där?”
En kvantitativ studie om förekomsten av rewrites och byråmaterial i svensk dagspress 1995 och 2015
The purpose of this study is to investigate the shares of original material compared with the shares of rewrites and agency material in the Swedish printed national daily press. We want to see how it differs today from 20 years ago. We did this to see whether or not the shares of rewrites and news agency materials have increased over time. In addition to this the study examines what kind of materials are rewritten and bought from news agencies. Through a quantitative content analysis we have examined two trendsetting Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. We have examined a synthetic week for each of the two newspapers from both 1995 and 2015 and analyzed a total of 1646 news articles. Through our study we came, among other things, to the conclusions that the proportion of original material for the entire group is 55 percent today, which is the same level as in 1995. However, the composition of the material that isn’t produced by the newspapers own editorial staff has changed. The proportion of rewrites for the whole group has doubled from 6 to 12 percent, while the amount of news agency materials have dropped from 39 to 33 percent. We then proceeded with examining and comparing the evening and the morning newspapers and the differences then became more remarkable. The changes in general have become more prominent in Sweden’s leading tabloid, Aftonbladet, where the proportion of the internal news output has increased slightly. The most dramatic change, however, is regarding the proportion of rewrites that has more than doubled since 1995. These increases have occurred at the expense of material from news agencies. In Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning newspaper, the trend has been slightly different. Here we have seen a constant amount of rewrites, but an increase of the material from news agencies at the expense of their internal news output. In this essays concluding part we use theories regarding tabloidization, digitalization and news evaluation to attempt to explain the changes we have identified.