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In this study, the results from a content analysis of four Swedish online citizen journalism outlets are presented and discussed. The analysis focuses on new digital venues for news-making in theory and the question of the political relevance of citizen journalism in reality. This broad question is operationalized by asking more specifically how citizen journalists tell the news, according to established distinctions between variations in topic dimensions, focus, and presentational style. Our results show that citizen journalists tend to tell soft news. They rarely report on policy issues, local authorities, or people affected by decisions being made by them. Furthermore, the news focuses on individual relevance and is mostly episodic in nature. The style of writing is predominantly impersonal and unemotional. In sum, our results suggest that citizen journalism in Sweden is not yet at a stage where it can be considered a plausible alternative to traditional journalism.

The accelerating news cycle means there is a risk that errors become more common, but digital media also allow for correcting errors continuously and being transparent about this. In this study, we investigate Swedish citizens' attitudes toward errors and corrections. The results demonstrate that citizens have strong expectations that news media publish correct information and they have little tolerance for errors. People's background and media use do not affect attitudes toward errors and corrections to any large extent, but media trust explains a small fraction of the results—It is only those who already trust the media that appreciate corrections.

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.

Research on relationship management in digital political public relations is scarce. Departing from arelationship management perspective, then, this study seeks to contribute to the field of political public relations by investigating whether political parties take advantage of what digital media platforms offer in terms of long-term commitment and reciprocity utilizing the Swedish national election in 2010 as a case study. The results show that the political parties utilized social media outlets primarily during and just before the time of the election and that interaction between parties and constituents were scarce and shallow. All parties shared the same pattern of activity, although there were some differences in the frequencies of use. Additionally, although user commitment increased over time, there were relatively few users who chose to follow/friend the political parties, suggesting that the large majority of the voters could not easily be reached through these platforms. In essence, the results indicate that social media as a political public relations tool is, so far, dwarfed by more traditional and analogue approaches.

Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.