Open AccessThe Recycling of News in Swedish Newspapers: Reused quotations and reports in articles about the crisis in the Swedish Academy in 2018
Author(s) -
Sanna Skärlund
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
nordicom review/nordicom review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.754
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 2001-5119
pISSN - 1403-1108
DOI - 10.2478/nor-2020-0005
Subject(s) - newspaper , revenue , reading (process) , media studies , political science , advertising , sociology , public relations , social science , business , law , accounting
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.