Rewriting for the masses : An analysis on the articles in Nyheter24 during two weeks.

Abstract: The object of this study was to get a wider picture of the articles published in the Swedish online newspaper Nyheter24. The newspaper is the biggest newspaper only coming out online in Sweden today and basically the idea was to get an overview of their content. The study was based upon two research questions: “What does Nyheter24 write about?” and “What type of journalism does Nyheter24 make?” My research method was a quantitative content analysis and the study contains 550 articles in total, gathered during two weeks time from the website. The results show that Nyheter24 writes about various topics but they tend to produce news stories with an odd or sensational angle. More than half of the articles studied in the news section were rewrites from other news media and less than 20 % of the articles in the same section had quotes from interviews done by the newspaper themselves. In the sports section, just one of all the articles published in the section during the two weeks contained a quote from an interview Nyheter24 had done. The study does also show that investigative journalism is rare at Nyheter24. But it was even more uncommon, zero articles in the news section, for the journalists to do reports of places or news events by going outside the newsroom. What played a bigger part in the news from Nyheter24 was social media. Especially the sports section and the entertainment section published stories where social media was the origin of the story. Generally the results show what several other researchers have found out about online journalism. There is a big recycling of news and the journalists tend to be stuck behind a computer, screening websites and doing rewrites to publish a lot of material quickly. Doing interviews to the stories seemed to have a lower priority.