Per Svensson: Festive cats are everywhere – but where do you find journalism? – Sydsvenskan

The Evening Post and the GT gets rid of their culture and leadership editors.

It is no news that the Swedish newspapers believe they can starve themselves to peace and happiness.

Still makes me the latest symptom of this deadly disease extra bleak. It depends not only on me for a number of years was the cultural editor of Expressen and thus also responsible for the culture pages of just KvP and GT. My sadness is also determined by the memories of the years in the mid 80′s when I was about to recreate Evening Post’s culture page. It had been done in the 70s by a management that believed itself to be in phase with the future, and therefore knew that the newspaper was no longer interested in a qualified opinion journalism, but instead wanted småtycka themselves.

The management was wrong.

To build up a fund of cultural capital takes a long time. To burn it goes very quickly.

P1′s Kulturnytt I hear GT’s managing editor Frida Boisen explain that cultural material still is not as requested digitally. Maybe she’s right. Maybe the demand for festive cats and dramatic news event bigger. The problem is that festive cats are everywhere and dramatic things happen, not every day, so that for a regional profiled newspaper is and will remain a competitive advantage to have your own opinion-driven material.

Also for the parent newspaper Expressen has been a strength to have direct contact with the cultural flow not only in Stockholm but also in the country’s second and third city. Cutting of the feelers is a self-injury.

Frida Boisens statement is also another hidden; an insensitivity to newspapers being. A newspaper is a hybrid creature, both a product and a carrier of culture. “Company” is just one of the magazine’s identities. The texts and images each day created by the editors are a different, and in my opinion the key.

It is happening now in the Swedish press is to “Company” in an increasingly arrogantly claims all power , while “journalism” bullied and pushed aside, as the industry’s Cinderella.

Just yesterday I was reminded of another power structure is, or at least has been, possible. PM Nilsson, political editor at Dagens Industri, reviewed in the Daily News Clas Barkmans book “My editors. DN 1964-2014. “

The review took the form of a loving portrait of the” publicist “, the mythical figure who in today’s DN incarnated by Peter Wolodarski.

Will this figure, the trustee of a mission not only from “the Board” but from society as a whole to survive the brutal conversion media industry now finds itself in? That is the question.

“Unless the newspaper and the editor’s political and cultural capital can be handed down from paper to online risk a whole culture to fall,” noted PM Nilsson.

Then we all be forced to realize the truth of the old philosophical aphorism: nothing comes from nothing. It requires a civilizational network so that we have something to talk about and reflect on. The newspaper was this network’s main node.