Nyheternas födelse
En kvantitativ undersökning av källor till lokala nyheter i lokaltidningar
The purpose of this thesis was to study the origin of the local news in local newspapers. Do the news originate mostly from the police, the municipality, from press releases or from the reporters own ideas? We also wanted to find out what kind of content predominated in texts with its origin in press releases respectively the reporters own ideas. Of course we also wanted to find out if there were any similarities or differences between the two studied newspapers.We used a type of constructed week, but with non random selection instead of random. We chose one of each weekday the newspapers were published and studied the news covered in the papers that specific day. We talked over the phone with the news editors and the reporters and simply asked them about the origin of each news text separately.The results showed that every fourth text originates from the police, and that police news often ends up as news items rather than articles. We also came to the conclusion that local newspapers use fewer press releases than earlier research has shown. Only one sixth of the news studied originates from press releases, which is less than we thought it would be. News with its origin in advertisements was less often found.News with its origin in the reporters own ideas deal with various subjects. A text that is written on the basis of a press release on the other hand is often about some kind of event and has almost always a very positive tone. We could not notice any remarkable difference between the two studied newspapers.