Tabloidiseringstendenser - i det redaktionella innehållet
Abstract
The daily newspaper market in Sweden has been a mighty strong media market, except for major market crisis which occurred in the 1990s in Sweden, that led to several newspapers came into an economic crisis. One of the actions that many Swedish newspapers did was to reduce the physical size of the newspaper from broadsheet to tabloid. After studying several academical studies from scientists and students who claim and show in their results that the tabloid tendencies has spread out in the editorial content I discovered that the common thing for these studies where firstly, that there were not many studies that showed the tabloid tendencies of the editorial content in a longer historical perspective, secondly that the studies jointly studied tabloidization tendencies (how the editorial content changed from writing about hard news to write about soft news) in the editorial content of newspapers that have changed the physical format size. The material that was analysed was tabloid tendencies in news articles in two daily Swedish newspapers, Jönköping-Posten (broadsheet) and Aftonbladet (tabloid) in the years 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The goal was to see if or how much of the editorial content of news articles that changed over time by tabloid tendencies in individual daily newspaper as well as a comparison of the various newspaper formats.
This lead to the purpose of this master study:
To investigate if it exists tabloid tendencies in the editorial content of news articles in the Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Jönköping-Posten between the 1950s to 1990s.
In addition this purpose was operationalized from theories of tabloidization, the main theories that are used in this master study is developed by the researchers Shelly McLachlan and Peter Golding and their definition for tabloidization range, form and style.
The best tool to analyse the material that have been gathered was to use of quantitative content analysis. The main tool used was the coding scheme that had been developed prior to the collection of information. This coding scheme are used for each article that are analysed. With the code scheme 1767 news articles was analysed (Aftonbladet 811 news articles and Jönköping-Posten 956 articles) and from these articles the tabloid tendencies in news articles was analysed by McLachlan and Goding theory of range, form and style.
The main findings in this master study show that tabloidization tendencies in news article in Swedish daily newspapers are more common in Aftonbladet (a tabloid newspaper) then Jönköpings-Posten ( a broad sheet newspaper) over time. However it also shows that Jönköpings-Posten has a lot of tabloidization tendencies in their news articles.
During the master study it was discovered the lack of historical research regarding tabloidization tendencies of Swedish daily newspapers and other media like television. If more scientists decided to do such studies, it would also be interesting to see where the Swedish newspapers will be placed in Collin Sparks chart ”Two Axes of journalism”.
However, there are many studies that examine tabloidization, how the graphical space has increased in Swedish newspapers (form). This study shows that there are other fields of tabloidization tendencies that haven’t been so well examined by the researchers (range and style), therefore I suggest more research in those fields.
This study show that even news articles have been exposed by tabloidization tendencies and as a part of the media critics field I think that have to be more examined
Degree
Student essay
Collections
View/ Open
Date
2014-10-17Author
Gustafsson, Mikael
Keywords
Tabloidization
tabloid
daily newspapers
visual communication
Series/Report no.
Examensarbete
M19
Language
swe