<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>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.</p>
</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.

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

School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences

Nordicom Review

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Newspapers in Sweden are experiencing reduced revenues due to decreases in advertisement sales and reader subscriptions. Given such circumstances, one way of...

Source	DN	SvD	Aftonbladet	Expressen	Total
Dagens Nyheter	–	13	19	18	50
Svenska Dagbladet	17	–	7	12	36
TT Nyhetsbyrån^a	9	11	7	6	33
Sveriges Television	5	2	6	12	25
Sveriges Radio	3	5	9	4	21
Expressen	8	4	4	–	16
Press releases from the Swedish Academy^b	3	7	6	0	16
Aftonbladet	5	1	–	5	11
Press releases from the Nobel Foundation	2	3	1	1	7
Press releases from the Swedish Royal Court^b	1	2	2	1	6

Total	53	48	61	59	221

Newspaper	Number of words in recycled quotations	Recycled quotations as shares of the total number of words (per cent)
Aftonbladet	2,683	21
Dagens Nyheter	3,158	16
Expressen	2,427	16
Svenska Dagbladet	1,947	12

Total/Average	10,215	16

Newspaper	Type 1	Type 2	Type 3	Total
Aftonbladet	6	12	12	30
Dagens Nyheter	9	8	13	30
Expressen	9	6	15	30
Svenska Dagbladet	11	11	8	30

Total	35 (29%)	37 (31%)	48 (40%)	120

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

Publié en ligne: 13 mars 2020

Pages: 69 - 84

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0005

Mots clés
journalism, recycling of news, churnalism, Swedish newspapers, social media

© 2020 Sanna Skärlund, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Most used sources of recycled quotations and reports

Amount and share of recycled quotations

Distribution of article types

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

Publié en ligne: 13 mars 2020

Pages: 69 - 84

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2020-0005

Mots clésjournalism, recycling of news, churnalism, Swedish newspapers, social media

© 2020 Sanna Skärlund, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Most used sources of recycled quotations and reports

Amount and share of recycled quotations

Distribution of article types

Mots clés
journalism, recycling of news, churnalism, Swedish newspapers, social media