Do you recognize yourself? : How interviewed people are produced in Barometern’s portrait interviews and how their confidence is like for local journalists.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the interviewed people feel about being described in portrait interviews and how exactly it matches with their own image of the interview. The main issues were: Do they recognize themselves in the published article? If they don’t, what do they think it depends on? If they had the opportunity to read the article text before publishing, to what extent were they allowed to make changes to the text? Do the interviewees trust the local papers? This report involves a qualitative study on portrait interviews from the local newspaper Barometern. The articles were selected between June and November this year. The criteria for the selection of articles were that it was to deal with a single person and there be one photograph of this person in the article as well. The last criterion was that the text comprise at least 2000 characters. Personal interviews were undertaken with the people who had been portraited. In total 12 persons were interviewed. The study shows that interviewed people were overall pleased with the article and the way they had been presented. About half of the interviewed persons read the article before publishing and most of them were free to make changes to the text, though there were a few that weren´t allowed this opportunity. If there had been some things wrong in the articles most of them were about factual errors. Peoples’ trust in local journalists were greater than in journalists in larger cities, which was assumed, but most of the people had a certain scepticism when it came to trust in media in general.