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more serious material would have been impossible to obtain with the limited number of
journalists working at the stations. Editors at both TV4 Norrbotten and TV4 Värmland
recognized that the daily pressure to produce news with limited staffing levels meant that
good, serious stories would have to be sacrificed for lighter stories if the serious stories were
not a certainty to make it into the evening program. Editors at the local TV4 stations could
not afford to send reporters out on stories if there was not a high degree of certainty that a
solid story would come out of it.
An interesting twist on the topic of resources was the suggestion from SVT regional
staff that one of the biggest differences between SVT and TV4 at the regional level was that
SVT had many more original stories, investigative reports, and ‘scoops’ as compared to TV4.
While it is undoubtedly true that Nordnytt and Tvärsnytt could devote more time and
resources towards deeper, investigative reports than the local TV4 newsrooms, observations
at the four regional newsrooms indicated that all four made extensive use of newspapers, local
radio news programs, press releases, and faxed memoranda as sources for potential stories,
and that the two regional SVT newsrooms did not have a significantly greater number of
stories that they had dug up themselves.
My findings in relation to resources are an important result of my project, but must be
examined with a measure of realism, and placed into their proper context. It is one of the
fundamental tenets of political economic research that commercial media attempt to use a
minimum amount of money to attract desired audiences, thereby maximizing their profits
through the sale of advertising space. To suggest that local TV4 stations, and the profit
motives of their owners, are any different in this respect, would be naïveté of the highest
order. Local TV4 newsrooms were under-staffed, the employees overworked, and the
stations utterly dependent upon decent viewing figures for their survival. Managers openly
Convention