Blows to the Head - Text and context in the journalism of crime
The aim of this article is to discuss the inner architecture of one of the most distinctive genres in news media; crime reporting. Two case studies of journalistic representations of violent crime (murder) from around the year 1900 serve as a point of departure for the analysis. This was a moment in Swedish history when newspapers were about to enter a 'modern' media discourse that to a previously unseen extent would allow editing and adaption of the material. In the article it is further argued that the process, in which medialized images of criminals and courses of events are constructed, is highly coloured by the inherent tendency of the media to dramatize ils content. Focusing on an era when much of the material published in newspapers were based on externally produced texts, such as court records, one can isolate the process of journalistization more easily, and thus analyze it quite closely. Even though few changes and additions were made to the court records when the journalists referred to them – and even though almost no autonomous gathering of information was made by the newspapers at the time a dominant pattern emerges as one looks at the ways in which crimes and criminals were portrayed. This pattern is biased towards stereotypical characters and situations, and it can be clearly identified as one of the core elements in crime journalism to this day.
