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DN:s new Norrland – A digital text analysis of the Swedish national newspaper Dagens Nyheters new editorial offices in northern Sweden.  

The aim of this study is to compare the coverage of Norrland in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter before and after the fourth of April 2022. That date marks the opening of two new editorial offices in Umeå and Luleå as part of new investments in the area. The material gathered for the analysis consists of articles from one year before the editorial offices opened, as well as one year after. The method utilized in this essay was a quantitative digital text analysis, as it was the method that allowed us to capture a whole year worth of news coverage. Using computers in quantitative analysis is of big help, and something that allowed the study to incorporate 1579 articles into two separate networks for our study. 

The theoretical framework of this study consists of Representation (defined by Stuart Hall), concepts of media shadow (by Nygren, Althén and Nord) as well as Madeleine Erikssons thoughts about reproducing Norrland in the media. Other theories such as news values, centers and peripheries and agenda setting are also used to strengthen the analysis. 

With the help of the network analysis tool Gephi, two different networks of correlations were identified and analyzed. The results show that despite the opening of the new editorial offices, 

DN still portrays a picture of Norrland as “the other”. New industries and investments are covered, with lots of articles regarding the need for workers in Norrland. In the networks from Gephi, we can see a shift from focus on Sweden to Stockholm as the main local areas that feature in the articles. However, regions, and most specifically, cities, are still in the periphery of the news discourse in DN.