Mid Sweden University

This paper explores the existing empirical data on media coverage of human trafficking as part of a larger effort to establish a theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of national media coverage of cross-border issues. Because the EU contains source, transit and destination countries for trafficking, it provides an interesting “laboratory” for observing how national media behave – are source countries more likely to “blame” the richer countries while destination countries “blame” the poverty in source countries? What are the solutions? Who is responsible? These questions are important if international solutions are to be achieved, but in order to solve problems, policy-makers, activists and academics need a reliable database upon which to build. This paper finds that there is a severe lack of systematic comparative analysis of media content on the issue of trafficking and proposes a possible approach to build upon in the future.

This article assesses online newspapers in Europe from a media evolutionary perspective, ten years after the introduction of the World Wide Web. Comparing print and online front pages of 51 newspapers in 14 countries in 2003, we argue that online newspapers complement print newspapers in modest ways. Online, publishers put more emphasis on service information, offer additional news items, that nonetheless report on similar topics in similar ways, and add personal interactivity, content selectivity and real-time news to the print news offering.

One subset of online newspapers charges for services, and offers more content and personal interactivity. Another, partly overlapping subset offers more original news; in a short and anonymous format. Overall, however, online newspapers in Europe make up a heterogeneous group, suggesting that online newspapers still have to find their definite form and role in the European news market.

Workshop on comparative methodology, International Communications Association, San Francisco, May 2007. Based on my COST-project experiences, aspects of comparative media content analysis.

Acdademic paper exploring Sweden as case study of national coverage of cross-border crime in general and human trafficking in particular

Book chapter addressing initial findings of Equal study on trafficking coverage in Swedish media.

Sammanfattning av två förstudier om bevakning kring människohandel i svensk press. Den första studien omfattar 1990-2004, menda den andra jämför kvälls- och morgonpress 2004-2005.