"Is Swedish media influenced by American media?"

Moderated by David Ibison, former Financial Times Scandinavia correspondent and now a consultant at the PR firm KREAB Gavin Anderson, the panel comprised Vicktor Olsson, foreign editor at the Swedish news agency TT; Kim McLaughlin, bureau chief of Bloomberg in Stockholm and Alexa Robertson, associate professor, Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, Stockholm University.

Ibison introduced the seminar with an anecdote of a bogus rebel assault from when he was in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, while reporting on the tsunami in 2004.  One night he received a call from an editor to check on a tip from a rebel assault on a UN compound there.  He called a UN official in the compound and was told that a gunshot had been heard but that there was no assault to speak of.  Nevertheless, CNN ran the story of the assault the next day and provided analysis for an entire news cycle.

That gunshot was the whole assault, even though it was completely untrue, Ibison said.  "It took away global attention from a major humanitarian catastrophe.  Objectivity was sacrificed to the news cycle.  The desire to beat competitors makes you blind."

While this illustrates poor news judgment, Ibison offered a few shining examples of American journalism:  The Washington Post's reporting on the Watergate scandal; The New York Times' publishing of the Pentagon Papers; 60 Minutes and big tobacco; and Seymour Hersh on the My Lai Massacre.

"Let's not go on an anti-American rant", he said, before opening the floor to Vicktor Olsson, who pointed to social media as the biggest American phenomenon influencing the Swedish news.

"Online publishing has introduced wonderful new ways of producing journalism", he said, adding that Twitter allowed TT to get and use real-time quotes from people on the ground during the Arab Spring in countries like Yemen, Libya, Syria and Egypt.

At the same time, he said, this poses a great challenge to the news media.  New subscribers for print journalism are on the decline, newspapers are losing advertising revenue while they have to produce more. "This changing environment puts new demands on newspapers."

The big question all media outlets are grappling with is how to finance journalism.  Hence, newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and, more recently, the New York Times, are starting to charge subscribers for online access, and the Huffington Post has a skeleton staff and 6,000 unpaid bloggers, he said.

The risks are significant, said Olsson: High-speed, black-and-white journalism that's easy to get and produce, at the expense of nuanced investigative reporting.

This is going to start to affect society and the reporting of complex issues such as migration and the right-wing extremism, he said, concluding, "I would like there to be a clarion call for the existence of journalists."

Bloomberg Bureau Chief Kim McLaughlin spends most of his time looking for things Swedish that will interest an American audience.  He said there has been an amazing increase in interest from US editors.  "Part of that is the obvious contrast of economic stability and relative success of Sweden and the number of vibrant start-ups like Spotify."

According to researcher Alexa Robertson, the clearest media influence has been in the political realm where Swedish politicians have adopted campaign strategy and image management tactics from the United States.  Robertson said this probably began with Thatcher, who brought in Satchi & Saatchi to help her with her voice, and more recently with Sarkozy, a shining example of how to promote your image by associating yourself with big media events and a famous wife.

Robertson said the Swedish mainstream media is not influenced to the same extent.  The real mark left is the second "social" media revolution (the first eing the satellite revolution in the 1980s, "when news went on fast-forward").  With newer outlets such as Al Jazeera, which claims to give a voice to the voiceless and phenomena like crowd-sourcing, the media has become a process.

"When you incorporate crowd-source material, you automatically give a voice to the non-elites," she said, adding that this comes from Sweden.  While journalists are still needed to help interpret what is going on, the idea that non-elites take up media space is very Swedish.

While American and British journalists are inclided to put the mike in front of a famous person/expert/politician, Swedish reporters are forever looking for a sound bite from the woman or man on the street. "In Sweden the most commonly recurring figure is the ordinary Swede."

She asks, "Is Swedish media influenced by the US? Maybe we should look at the Swedishization of the news instead."

Written exclusively for AmCham by Christina Anderson, Battison & Partners.