“I’m absolutely willing to participate for the newspaper once again”

In this study we have investigated the news interview both from the perspective of the journalists and of the subjects of the interview. We have made interviews with 50 persons who participated as sources in the news and with 21 journalist who wrote the articles in the local newspapers Östran and Barometern in Kalmar, the 21 of November 2008. The journalists were asked to tell their story of how the articles where produced, how they prepared before the interviews, if they had an image of the articles in advance and if they were satisfied with the outcome of the article. The persons who had been interviewed were asked to tell us how they felt about the interviews, if they were satisfied with the outcome of the article, if they could consider being in the newspaper again and to give their opinion of local journalism. Most of the persons who had been quoted in the articles said that at least one or two things went wrong in the articles. Despite this they would not hesitate to be interviewed the newspaper again. Surprising for us was to see how often the journalists get “served” with both the news and the subjects of the interview. It was for an example often that the Journalists visited press conferences and wrote articles from press releases. When the journalists produced news in this way, they simply interviewed those present at the press conference or the contact person in the press releas