Allra sämst är överskriftsrubriker

In the Swedish contemporary media landscape, marked by limited financial resources, many local newspapers are searching for sustainable business models. This reality brings an unprecedented challenge: finding a balance between the market-driven demands of economic efficiency and audience expectations of trustworthy local news. A way of doing this is by writing captivating headlines that appeal to the readers’ curiosity, creating a desire to find out more and thereby convincing them to buy a subscription. Although this method does not come without risks: excessively sensationalist headlines may direct traffic to the newspaper website, but could also adventure the audiences’ trust towards said newspaper. This raises an important question: how do journalists at Swedish local newspapers balance market-driven logics and ideals of journalism as public service when writing digital headlines? Through qualitative interviews with six local news journalists across Sweden the aim of this study is to examine how professionals balance these realities in their production of digital headlines. The framework combines sociologic theories about the dynamics of hierarchies in media work and theoretical perspectives on commercial journalism. A theory linked to the phenomenon information gap, a term that is correlated to the more common expression "clickbait", is also applied to the material. The analysis reveals that journalists tend to use information gap in headlines as a way of attracting the readers’ interest and that the hierarchical structures of the media companies are present throughout every aspect of the journalistic practice of writing digital headlines.