The article presents a network analysis of 22,861,013 geocoded external hyperlinks, collected from 230 Danish, 220 Norwegian and 208 Swedish news websites in 2016. The analysis asks what the structural properties of the Scandinavian media systems—including its geography and ownership structures—mean for news outlets’ centrality within the hyperlinked news ecology. The analysis finds that whereas incumbent legacy media occupy central positions, about one third of the network is absent from the hyperlinked interaction, primarily local, independently owned newspapers. A multiple linear regression analysis shows that national distribution and corporate ownership correlates to network centrality more than other predictors. As brokers in the network consist of the large, legacy, capital-based news organisations, hyperlink connectivity is primarily characterised by proximity to the centres of power, corporate ownership, agenda setting incumbency and national distribution. 

One of the main debates within journalism research during the last decade has been the role of citizens as contributors or, conversely, as threats to the practice of journalism. While participation has been explored from many different theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives, one perspective remains noticeably underexplored – the perspective of the citizens themselves. Using social contract theory as a backdrop, this study draws on a representative survey (N = 2091) and focus groups (N = 82) in Sweden. The results show that although citizens do not bring up participation as an important element of journalism, they become more skeptical the more participation affects journalism. Furthermore, they expect journalists to moderate citizen contributions according to established journalistic standards. From the perspective of social contract theory, participation in journalism appears to be more of a problem than a benefit to citizens.

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.

In the wake of downsizing, lay offing and outsourcing of journalistic work 32 Swedishmunicipalities do no longer have the presence of a journalistic editorial office. Thismeans that journalists will have to travel longer if they want to cover the place in situ.Arguably, the increased proximity between journalists and the municipality will haveconsequences for how the latter is covered by the former. Against this background thestudy asks a simple question – what happens with the news coverage of a municipalitywhen there are no journalists around? To inform this question we conduct a quantitativecontent analysis (N= approximately 400) measuring amongst other things – newstopics, framing, style, original reporting, and sourcing practices in the news coverageof eight Swedish municipalities. Drawing from the classification of municipalities bythe Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions as well as population numberswe compare four municipalities that have an editorial office from a legacy mediaorganization with four municipalities that does not have an editorial office. The samplewas collected from Retrievers database, the largest archive of news articles in theNordic countries, and consisted of seven randomized days from 2014-2015. Preliminaryfindings indicate that not having an editorial office means that the municipalityis covered less, that areas such as sports, crime, accidents, economics, and communitynews receive less attention and that citizens are quoted less often. Implications forboth the politic and community dimensions of a municipality are discussed.

Sharing has emerged as a keyword in the contemporary media landscape in the last decade. For journalism and the news industry sharing is viewed as both a threat and possibility as it enables greater reach but also less control. So far research has not to a great extent been able to show what kind of news stories that goes viral and there is also a lack of methodological discussions about how to measure shared news and what results different approaches provide. Results from this study show that politics is the most commonly spread news topic and that news sites with a tabloid background are the most successful media forms in encouraging spreading and interaction of news stories. The study also shows that different methodological starting points – starting at the news sites themselves or an aggregator – provides results that both overlap and differentiate.

Over the last decade, free labor has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding new or semi-new forms of labor in the contemporary digital economy. This article critiques and develops this concept, with specific reference to work in the media industries, by presenting a historically grounded typology of free labor that also highlights some of the analytical problems with the current use of the concept. Our typology presents seven metaphors of free labor based on historical instances of roles people have taken on when performing unpaid labor: those of The Slave, The Carer, The Apprentice, The Prospector, The Hobbyist, The Volunteer, and The Patsy. A key conclusion is that free labor is performed by different actors at either end of increasingly complex and temporally stretched out value chains. This necessitates a more fine-grained and historicized use of the concept of free labor.