The Recycling of News in Swedish Newspapers: Reused quotations and reports in articles about the crisis in the Swedish Academy in 2018

Abstract

Newspapers in Sweden are experiencing reduced revenues due to decreases in advertisement sales and reader subscriptions. Given such circumstances, one way of being more cost-effective is for journalists to recycle pieces of texts already published by others. In this article, I investigate to what extent and how the four biggest newspapers in Sweden do this. Following a close reading of 120 articles about the crisis in the Swedish Academy in 2018, I found that the newspapers included recycled quotations attributed to other media to a great extent. Moreover, recycled statements from other media were often intermingled with quotes from new interviews; however, social media were not used as sources very often. A discussion of the problematic aspects of “a culture of self-referentiality” concludes the article.

Exploring the link between media concentration and news content diversity using automated text analysis

“…We therefore do not assume our results to be easily transferable to other regions and countries, in spite of DPG Media and Mediahuis' acknowledged increased presence in other European markets. However, like similar studies carried out elsewhere, ours too assumes a negative relationship between increased media market concentration and news content diversity (Vogler et al, 2020;, even though there is no universal consensus on this (Sjøvaag, 2014;Skärlund, 2020). The strengths of this study, and their main contributions to scholarship, are its link with news diversity and democratic frameworks, as well as its research approach, using automated content analysis to properly measure homogeneity at vast bodies of articles at once.…”

“…Scholarship, however, remains divided on the topic. Depending on the vantage point of researchers and the media market(s) they analysed, they either established a negative link (Badr, 2021; Baum and Zhukov, 2019; Blankenship and Vargo, 2021; Boczkowski and de Santos, 2007; Hendrickx and Ranaivoson, 2019; Hendrickx and Van Remoortere, 2021; Redden and Witschge, 2010; Vogler et al, 2020) or at least no outspoken negative link (Beckers et al, 2017; Sjøvaag, 2014; Skärlund, 2020) between heightened media concentration and news content diversity.…”

News Recommender Systems and News Diversity, Two of a Kind? A Case Study from a Small Media Market

“…These similar findings have frequently been positioned as potentially jeopardizing the diverse information flow of citizens and their opportunities to fulfill their democratic duties in society. However, said relationship has not always been established as merely negative, with some studies finding no negative or even positive effects of media consolidation and content diversity (e.g., Sjøvaag 2014;Skärlund 2020). Furthermore, scholarship has also pointed out that 'too much' diversity is not always a good thing either due to possible dramatic increases of fragmentation within societies due to the lack of a shared, common agenda (Atwater 1986;Beckers et al 2017;Calhoun 1992;Helberger 2019).…”

Meer van hetzelfde? Content sharing bij Vlaamse DPG Media-kranten

“…De studie van Cage et al (2015) bij Frans onlinenieuws toonde aan dat slechts een derde origineel nieuws is en een kwart van alle artikels in minder dan vier minuten gekopieerd wordt. Nochtans zijn de gevolgen van verhoogde mediaconcentratie op bedrijven, titels en hun nieuwsinhoud niet eenduidig negatief: uit Noors onderzoek bleek dat de homogeniteit tussen regionale titels van hetzelfde bedrijf na een fusiegolf 'verwaarloosbaar' was (Sjøvaag, 2014, p. 518), en ook een recente Zweedse studie vond geen aanleiding tot verhoogde homogenisering van nieuwsinhoud (Skärlund, 2020).…”