Foreign correspondence is essential for our understanding of the world and therefore it is paramount that we be aware of how it is affected by modern technology and altered economic conditions. In this study we set out to investigate the state of foreign correspondence today, in comparison to twenty years ago. More specifically we compared foreign news articles from a week in 1993 and the same week in 2013, in the Swedish newspapers Expressen and Dagens Nyheter. We chose these newspapers as we felt they each represented a different area of Swedish journalism, DN being a regular morning newspaper and Expressen being a tabloid newspaper. We looked mainly at three things in the articles: who was the writer, i.e. was the article by a correspondent, a news agency or someone else, what source was used and what part of the world was it about. We then made comparisons between both the different years and the different newspapers, as well as current and twenty years old lists of correspondents. According to the material we looked at there were some clear differences between foreign correspondence 1993 and 2013. Overall the number of correspondents has gone down, although the difference is mainly due to changes made by Expressen, while DN had a much smaller decrease. The number of articles written by correspondents had similarly decreased, however the total number of foreign articles had not. And for Expressen the number of articles based on their own information had actually increased. And so had the number of countries covered during that week. To cover for the decrease in articles written by foreign correspondents, DN had mainly increased their use of news agencies, while Expressen had a considerably larger share of articles written by journalists who are not regular foreign correspondents. The decrease of foreign correspondents had had no negative effect on the amount of articles, covered countries or articles based on the newspapers own information. With an increasingly globalized world, having journalist stationed around it has become less necessary to keeping up a large quantity of foreign articles. Journalism is, however, about more than quantity, and there is reason to be cautious of a foreign journalism that is increasingly written by people lacking specialized knowledge of the area they are writing about.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-31683 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Ternander, Elin, Svensson, Linus |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ), Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ) |
| 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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