This study examines three commercially driven swedish news organizations that cover consumer electronics in some way. These are: MacWorld, Dagens Industri and Ny Teknik. The aim of this study is to analyze the policies and ethical guidelines regarding consumer electronics of each news organization and see how these translate to the finished articles. This study also aims to examine if the articles from each news organization can be interpreted as native advertising and/or adverising for the product. To achieve this, qualitative interviews have been conducted with representatives from each news organization, about their guidelines and general attitudes regarding consumer electronics. Furthermore, a qualitative content analysis of 13 articles in total has been conducted. To limit this study, one product has been chosen as the analysis object. This product is the Apple Watch and all the analyzed articles has a focus on the product. The results show that the policies and ethical guidelines about consumer electronics where very similiar between the three news organizations. All three were strongly against native advertising and any other form of favouritism. They emphazied that their credibilty towards their audience was the most important thing and that their focus were on what was important and interesting for the audience, not financial gain. However, the representatives, did say that they experienced their reporting about consumer electronics as difficult, and descibed it as a balancing act. The content analysis show that all of the articles about the Apple Watch had similarities to native advertisning and regular advertising for the product, and that they could be interpreted as such. There was a discrepancy between the policies and the actual articles. The interviews painted a picture of the ideal and morally correct way of reporting about consumer electronics. The articles on the other hand did not always live up to these standards. However, this should not be interpreted as if the media organizations were immoral and lied about their use of native advertising. Yet, this study illustrates the difficulty in reporting about consumer electronics without it being interpreted as advertising, and supports previous calls for revised guidelines and definitions about what is and what is not considered native adverising.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-32364 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Johnsson, Alexander |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Journalistik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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