The aim of this thesis is to study what means are used in newspaper leaders (editorials) to influence public opinion. In order to obtain a wide range of such means, I have chosen material that has a clear timeframe and illustrates strong political antagonism, concerning the 1971 conflict between the Saco and SR unions and the Swedish state. Leaders from eight different newspapers with different party affiliations are analysed – six morning and two evening newspapers. What type of message leaders convey is examined mainly at the sentence level. Writers report what happened, assess the situation and analyse the causes and explanations for there being a labour conflict. They express criticism of those involved in various ways and exhort them to take recommended courses of action to resolve the conflict. Paragraphs can also be categorised in this way. How criticism is expressed is studied in detail because the material is rich in critical utterances of different types.  Various theories about text types and speech act theory provide a theoretical background that is applied to the material. A number of different theories about what defines a genre are presented and tested on the leaders. The results of the investigation indicate that a large number of leaders from the morning newspapers are structured in a similar way, with the paragraph as the unit. They reveal a pattern, the normal pattern, where information is presented in a given order in the majority of morning leaders and the greatest number of message types is used. There is also a pattern of analysis/criticism, with critical and analytical paragraphs alternating and the analysis substantiating the criticism, as a rule. The few leaders in the morning newspapers that do not form a pattern may be strongly critical or almost solely analytical. One of the morning newspapers has many critical leaders that argue or incite. No analysis is made of evening newspaper leaders at the paragraph level since the paragraphs are short; instead, they are analysed as a whole, as are the argumentative leaders. The analysis shows that many leaders are structured in a similar way while at the same time there is considerable variation in the material, which is attributable to there being different types of editorials.

Background Social media influencer advertising is a fast-growing form of advertising. It has led to companies striking deals with influencers to benefit from the influencers’ big audiences of followers and social media users. Influencers promote the companies’ brands and/or products in exchange for a payment. Influencer advertising comes in two forms, sponsored and non-sponsored, factors that can have a significant effect on purchase intention when combined with different message types as pictures, text, and a combination of picture and text and trust. Objective This report's primary goal is to study the effect of trust, message type, sponsored, and non-sponsored advertising on consumers' purchase intentions on social media and contribute to previous studies.  Method This study is a quantitative study with primary data. The method used for collecting the data is an online survey. The survey has been divided into two parts and sent out to the Swedish population who uses social media. One with questions on sponsored advertisements’ and another with questions of non-sponsored advertisements. In total, the surveys had 107 complete responses. The data was then analyzed using IBM’s SPSS program.  Result Tests for the first hypothesis found no significant difference in the mean values of sponsored and non-sponsored advertisements' effect on purchase intentions. The second hypothesis established that the use of a picture message-type in advertisements had a more significant impact on purchase intention then a combination of both text and picture. The last and final hypothesis result found that influencer advertisements, sponsored or non-sponsored did not affect consumers' trust in any significant way and therefore did not affect purchase intention.  Conclusion Companies should take into consideration the benefit of utilizing influencer-picture advertisements’ when it comes to the promotion of easily understood products, such as water bottles. Further work also needs to be done on more underlying factors that can affect consumers' purchase intentions.   Keywords Influencer, Sponsored advertising, Non-sponsored advertising, Online survey, Message type