The Reality series Big Brother has received a lot of media attention lately, and Aftonbladet has published a long series of articles about the program.
Thirty of the Big Brother articles are written a reporter employed by the production company Meter, which also does the program on TV4's behalf. The surveillance is part of a commercial collaboration between TV4 and Aftonbladet, reports Dagens Media.
The articles highlight, among other things, the broadcast times for Big Brother, and direct links to the program in play services such as C More and TV4 Play. At the end of the articles, next to the reporter's name, it says "Meter", but that it is the name of the production company is not stated, and the reporter's email address leads to Aftonbladet.
It is also not stated that the articles are part of a commercial collaboration, or that the reporter is employed by the same company that makes the series he reports on.
"Relevant monitoring"The cultural news has sought out Lena K Samuelsson, responsible publisher at Aftonbladet. She does not have the opportunity to interview. Eric Rosén, assistant editor at the newspaper, comments on the Meter collaboration in an email to Dagens Media.
"Since we collaborate with TV4 around Big Brother, we have in conjunction with it chosen to buy text coverage of Meter which has people close to the production, which gives us a quick and relevant monitoring of what is happening".
Rosén believes that reporting is not uncritical, and that Aftonbladet itself decides which of Meters Big Brother articles are published. The links to TV4's play services, Eric Rosén compares it with blue links to journalistic sources in news articles online.
"When we focus on monitoring within the framework of this collaboration, it feels highly relevant to link to the content," he comments.
After Dagens Media paid attention to the Meter collaboration, Aftonbladet has on Wednesday added clarification in some of the articles, stating that it is a collaboration between Aftonbladet, Meter and TV4.