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Transparency has emerged as an ethical principle in contemporary journalism and is contended to improve accountability and credibility by journalists and scholars alike. However, to date, few attempts have been made to record the public’s views on transparency. This study enriches current knowledge by using data from an experiment, survey and focus groups in Sweden collected between 2013 and 2015. Overall, the results suggest that the respondents are not particularly moved by transparency in any form; it does not produce much effect in the experiments and is not brought up in the focus groups. While that is the key finding of this study, it should also be noted that various forms of user participation are evaluated negatively, while providing hyperlinks, explaining news selection and framing, and correcting errors are viewed positively. Implications for journalism practice and research are discussed.

It has been argued that the future of journalism resides within a global media ethics. Accordingly, journalism must renew itself by becoming less parochial and connect “citizens of the world” to a “global public sphere”. In drawing upon a panel study with Swedish journalists, this paper shows that journalists do not define their everyday work according to the principles of global journalism. Most of them do, however, agree with such principles in normative visions of their profession. The paper furthermore illustrates the importance of taking into account various positions in the journalistic field when trying to identify global journalism. A small minority producing “hard news” for media organizations with national or international reach comes somewhat close to embodying the ideals of global journalism. For most journalists, however, everyday work consists of covering domestic issues for domestic audiences. As such, the study pinpoints a domestically biased doxa in the field of journalism that is unlikel...

While there is a large body of research on news values and news selection, most research does not clearly distinguish between the concept of news and news selection, on the one hand, and news value ...

This longitudinal study compares the development and implementation of multimedia on Swedish broadsheet and tabloid online news sites between 2005 and 2010. It also seeks the reasons behind these developments by interviewing journalists working on the sites. The results show that the initial implementation of multimedia was slow but increased sharply in pace between 2007 and 2008. By 2010, on average, one in four news items had some element of multimedia attached to them. Furthermore, results show that it was the quality papers that were the quickest off the mark rather than tabloids. The antecedents for this advance seem to be a mix of technological capacities, professional norms and economic needs.

Transparency has been suggested as a new norm in journalism. However, few studies have investigated how the overarching notion of transparency is utilized in everyday news. The purpose of this study is to identify and compare how leading mainstream online news media in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden make use of transparency techniques in news items. The results show that transparency has begun to affect online news but that current journalism practice is a long way from a fully fledged transparency norm.

According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden.