Att sälja en journalist – Hur dagstidningar marknadsför sina journalister

Abstract

Att sälja en journalist – Hur dagstidningar marknadsför sina journalister Written by: Jonatan Fjelstad & Viktor Mölne Bachelor´s degree of Journalism Department of Journalism, Media & Communication. Autumn term 2013 University of Gothenburg The purpose of this study is to determine if Swedish newspapers has increased the visibility of their own journalists between the years 2000 and 2012 and if that’s the case how they have done so. By doing so we hope to shed some light on how individual journalists are increasingly personalized and how this can be part of the newspapers branding strategy. The journalist’s personal brands have been the subject of more research lately. But from the perspective of the newspaper itself, not much has been studied. We have utilized a broad theoretical approach with its foundation in commercialization and some personalization and visualization. We also lean quite heavily on research focused on branding, especially branding for media corporations. The nature of the study is quantitative and we have studied three Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen. We have coded all the respective newspapers opinion material and plugs, everything that mentions the material in the paper or other media forms, for individual journalists. In total 1041 units of analysis data has been collected and analysed. Our results show that there is an increase in the amount of mentioning of individual journalists in plugs, both stand-alone and in context of other articles. In 2012 we saw almost 5 times as many as in 2000. The big majority of these were to columns and other opinionated material. To our surprise, however, we found have found no signs that opinionated material is used to promote the work of the newspapers own journalists in any greater extent.