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When a news item from Madrid was republished in Stockholm at the end of the sev-enteenth century, it might be a month and a half old. By then, the same passage oftext had travelled and materialised widely across much of the European continent.Just over one hundred years later, a local Swedish editor could boast that he was ableto bring stories to press faster than the official Stockholm newspaper because he hadsecured a steady delivery of German publications to cut from, while his colleagues inthe capital relied on much older English newspapers. And although, throughout mostof press history, cutting must be understood metaphorically, a pair of scissors and abottle of glue became actual tools of journalistic practice during the nineteenth cen-tury. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the telegraph became an importantpart of the infrastructure for the dissemination of texts that were reprinted. Around1900, advertising campaigns – that is, mass reprinting from a single source, althoughnot reused in a chain or relay-like fashion – were conducted on an almost globalscale. And in the 1930s, by means of stereotype plates or lighter so-called flongs, a suc-cessful Australian author could have three serials running simultaneously in as manyas forty newspapers. Shared newspaper content has a long and rich history.

Today’s sharing culture calls for investigations of dissemination, accessibility and content reuse in the past. The book examines the conditions for sharing and disseminating information and stories, how cross-border networks interacted with local actors and how text sharing changed over time. It deals with periodicals from several countries from the 17th century to the present. The chapters analyse verbatim reprints as well as creative forms of reuse, local contexts as well as global infrastructures. Some focus solely on periodicals, others on the relationship with other media. The book combines an empirical focus with a pool of historical and methodological expertise. Digital methods are combined with traditional qualitative methods. Focusing on the periodical press is congenial in that it has to a very large extent consisted of (and still consists of) reused content. Reuse is – despite a long historiographical focus on originality and high-profile journalists and publications – constitutive of what periodicals are. The volume is thus highly relevant to both academia and society at a time when the public sphere seems to be imploding under the pressure of orchestrated yet uncontrollable content sharing.

This chapter presents research on office equipment as journalistic tools and how they have shaped news, editorial practices, and professional roles. It follows two technologies - scissors and typewriters - from editorial offices and into underground networks where the tools are turned into "small media." Scissors and paste pots were important technologies in the nineteenth-century press. To cut and reprint text items from other newspapers made individual papers part of networks of text reuse and information flows. Yet, this reproduction also restricted the possibilities of self-expression of the individual journalist. The introduction of typewriters in the early twentieth century made it possible to speed up news production. They were often introduced along with a division of labor, where reporters gathered information and the rewrite staff typed the stories. However, examining the technologies also in other contexts show that material conditions play out differently in different organizations and cultures. Used in fanzine production, for example, scissors became creative tools of self-expression. In totalitarian regimes, typewriters were used to reproduce underground newsletters in distributed networks where readers took part as writers and distributors. The examples illustrate that the materiality of journalism matters, but always in interaction with practices and economic, political and cultural circumstances.

Riksdagens mediehistoria analyserar Sveriges riksdags interna ­mediekanaler och undersöker hur politikens mediala villkor förändrats över tid.­ Tidsspannet är långt; boken behandlar en tidsperiod på drygt tvåhundra år. Fokus ligger framför allt på 1900-talet. Massmedier har naturligtvis länge rapporterat om riksdagens arbete; omvänt har riksdagsledamöter haft ett medialt intresse. Men bokens huvudsakliga fokus gäller de mindre uppmärksammade grå medierna i riksdagens vardag – läskpapper, stålpennor, kyrktelefoner, diktafoner, rörpost – och hur de på en rad olika sätt reglerade det politiska beslutsfattandet. Forskningsintresse har av tradition riktats mot debatternas innehåll, inte de stenografiska praktiker som gjort att det går att ta del av diskussionerna i ­ efterhand. På samma sätt har resultat av voteringar undersökts, men få har uppmärksammat de elektroniska system med vilka rösterna avlämnats och protokollförts. Detsamma gäller riksdagstrycket, som i regel betraktats som så självklart att dess praktiska tillblivelse – påverkat av en myriad aktörer – glömts bort. Riksdagens mediehistoria är strukturerad i sju kapitel som alla undersöker specifika delar av riksdagens mediala infrastruktur – rum, flöden, ljud, tal, text, rösträkning och datorisering – samt hur de villkorade institutionens arbetsformer. 

This paper introduces version 1.0 of riksdagsdebatter.se, a freely available and user-friendly interface for searching, filtering, and exploring Swedish parliamentary speeches since 1867. The underlying corpus is based on open-access data from the Swedish Parliament, further processed and enriched within the SWERIK project, including re-OCRing the debate records, segmenting the text into individual speeches, and adding structured metadata, with ongoing improvements to data quality. The corpus currently comprises over one million annotated speeches, totaling approximately 450 million words, and offers a comprehensive record of political debate in modern Swedish history. This resource has wide-ranging applications for researchers and students in digital humanities, history, political science, and sociology, as well as for journalists, policymakers, and the general public. Version 1.0 of riksdagsdebatter.se provides four primary tools: word trends, keyword in context, n-gram analysis, and the ability to create and download filtered sub-corpora. 

As mass migration from Sweden to the USA took off in the late 1860s, texts started to flow between Swedish and Swedish-American newspapers. A network of interconnected papers was established, based on cut-and-paste journalism and journalists moving between the countries. By combining digital text mining and network analysis with a biographical approach, this article examines the role of one specific editor and his paper within the transatlantic exchange system. The analysis shows that Isidor Kjellberg (1841–1895) and his newspaper Östgöten acted as a guide, giving advice and updates on American conditions to Swedes who wanted to migrate. Kjellberg also used the Swedish-American press as an ally in his campaigns for political reform, workers’ rights, and equality, but he also incorporated the methods of American new journalism in his own reporting. The result was not American journalism according to the standard news paradigm, but a hybrid serving his own political agenda.

Seasonal and maritime-related variations in newspaper content and circulation speed have been observed in the literature. This study of Swedish conditions 1790–1829 documents such differences. However, its focus is on domestic circulation and its dependence upon, among other things, incoming foreign news. By combining a computer-assisted method that tracks text reuse with close readings, and by breaking down the circulation into genres and categories of duration, historical change in these variations is made visible. While previous research has emphasised the explanatory power of technology, this article shows that more factors must be considered. Although technological infrastructural advancements were very limited, circulation times decreased and seasonal variations were evened out. This is best explained, this article suggests, by the growth of the system itself, by overall policy changes and by the increased scope for individual actors to change the culture and the protocols of the system, whether intentionally or not.

In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.

What a politician says in the parliament is not always what gets printed. In turning spoken words into printed records, the language changes, often towards formalization. The stenographers play a key role in this linguistic transformation. Their job is to align oral speeches with linguistic norms and parliamentary nomenclature. In this context, the formulaic trumps the personal. In our paper, we target these formulaic transformations, which we call the stenographic bias. Our analytical work is guided by the following research questions: In what ways are the printed records shaped by the stenographic bias? And what mechanisms are part of shaping this bias?

The paper is empirically based on stenographic guidelines defining language norms and procedural rules, primarily from the 1980s and 2020s, as well as supplemented parliamentary material. To study the formulaic language over time and how language norms and rules affected the printed debate records on the aggregated level, we make use of a recent annotated dataset of Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2020. By combining close reading and distant reading we aim to identify and discuss cases and phrases that shed light on the way stenographic norms and procedures have influenced parliamentarians’ speeches as they are recorded in the protocols.