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Abstract
An increasing flow of amateur images of global crises presents challenges and opportunities for mainstream news media. Furthermore, many news organizations now solicit eyewitness reports for near-instant upload to Web editions. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on amateur images in the regular news flow, in particular in newspapers. Thus, this case study examines the general frequency of amateur content, the gatekeeping process and the opinions of editors making decisions about images for publication in the online and print editions of four Swedish newspapers. Our findings, based on quantitative content analyses and interviews, indicate that a majority of the content falls in the hard-news category in contrast to findings in previous research about user-generated text content. Moreover, it appears regularly but in small numbers in a tabloid-content daily and a regional paper but hardly ever in broadsheet-content papers, and that opinions in the newsroom about amateur images vary from a lack of interest to a stated need for them in the regular news coverage. The low impact of amateur content may be due to the gatekeeping process and professional standards of photography, as well as a lack of audience interest and difficulties in implementing new structures in the newsrooms. In sum, the findings disprove predictions in the literature of a near-paradigmatic rise of amateur content in the mainstream news media.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank the special issue guest editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments, and we are grateful to our colleague Lars Nord for his inspired and thorough feedback on our work.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The circulation for the single-sold tabloid is 142,000 copies per day in print and the number of unique browsers reached in traffic measurement is around 5 million per week. The general reach, independent of platform, is approximately 46 percent of the population. The printed circulation for both metropolitan dailies is 300,000 (Dagens Nyheter) and 160,000 (Svenska Dagbladet) copies per day. The reach in the Stockholm area is 30 percent (Dagens Nyheter) and 15 percent (Svenska Dagbladet). The number of unique browsers is 1.5 million (Dagens Nyheter) and 1.4 million (Svenska Dagbladet) per week. The regional paper (Helsingborgs Dagblad) has a circulation of 70,000 copies per day, a reach in the main area of around 55 percent, and 0.3 million unique browsers per week.