Sponsrat av. Dagstidningsjournalisters inställning till sponsrat material

Abstract

Our purpose with this study is to identify different opinions of sponsored content among Swedish news journalists who work at newspapers. The purpose of this study will be examined through three main questions:  How do news journalists motivate their view on sponsored content in relation to the journalistic ideals?  How do news journalists perceive possible conflicts of interest between economic and publicistic goals?  In which forms do news journalists want to work with sponsored content in the future? We examine these questions by doing qualitative interviews with four journalists at Svenska Dagbladet and four journalists at Göteborgs-Posten. The ages and the sex of the people we interview is mixed so we can identify differences between these sexes and generations. We will compare their opinions and views on sponsored content with their relation to professional identity and already established ideals. We want to see if the ideals are different to journalist that work with sponsored content in contrast to journalists that have not worked with sponsored content. Our result show that even though advertisements take other forms than before and management in media have more and more control over both economic and publicistic questions, journalists still hold on to their ideals. The result shows differences between younger and older journalists. Although the result may not be compared by age, but rather by form of employment, the younger journalist were more tolerant towards sponsored content. The result also showed that those who had worked with sponsored content before had a more tolerant view. Those were also the journalists who said they could work more with sponsored content in the future. This while the older journalists said they would never work with that kind of content.