A local newspaper as mediator in transatlantic networks during the late nineteenth century
Isidor Kjellberg and Östgöten
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/journalistica.v19i1.153248Nøgleord:
americanization, computational methods, cut-and-paste journalism, immigrant press, partisan pressResumé
As mass migration from Sweden to the USA took off in the late 1860s, texts started to flow between Swedish and Swedish-American newspapers. A network of interconnected papers was established, based on cut-and-paste journalism and journalists moving between the countries. By combining digital text mining and network analysis with a biographical approach, this article examines the role of one specific editor and his paper within the transatlantic exchange system. The analysis shows that Isidor Kjellberg (1841–1895) and his newspaper Östgöten acted as a guide, giving advice and updates on American conditions to Swedes who wanted to migrate. Kjellberg also used the Swedish-American press as an ally in his campaigns for political reform, workers’ rights, and equality, but he also incorporated the methods of American new journalism in his own reporting. The result was not American journalism according to the standard news paradigm, but a hybrid serving his own political agenda.
Referencer
Alm, M. (2002). Americanitis: Amerika som sjukdom eller läkemedel: Svenska berättelser om USA åren 1900–1939. Lunds Universitet.
Backlund, J. O. (1952). A Century of the Swedish American Press. Swedish American Newspaper Co.
Barton, H. A. (1994). A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840–1940. Southern Illinois University Press.
Beijbom, U. (1987). The Swedish Press. In S. M. Miller (ed.), The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, (pp. 386–387). Greenwood Press.
Beijbom, U. (2020). Press och pennfäktare i Svensk-Amerika. Emigrantinstitutets vänner.
Björk, U.J. (2000). The Swedish-American Press as an Immigrant Institution. Swedish-American Studies, 51(4), 268–282. https://doi.org/10.1353/swe.2000.a940530
Blanck, D. (2016). “Very Welcome Home Mr. Swanson”: Swedish Americans Encounter Homeland Swedes. American Studies in Scandinavia, 48(2), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v48i2.5454
Blanck, D.& Hjorthén, A. 2016. Transnationalizing Swedish-American Relations. Journal of Transnational American Studies, 7(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.5070/T871030649
Bonnier, J. (1870). Letter to Isidor Kjellberg. In Kjellbergs samling 1969:2, vol. 4. Linköpings stifts- och landsbibliotek.
Broersma, M. (2010). Transnational Journalism History: Balancing Global Universals and National Peculiarities. Medien & Zeit, 25(4), 10–15.
Broersma, M. (2020). Americanization, or: The Rhetoric of Modernity. How European Journalism Adapted US Norms, Practices and Conventions. In K. Arnold, P. Preston & S. Kinnebrock (eds.), The Handbook of European Communication History, (pp. 403–419). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119161783.ch22
Cordell, R. (2015). Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers. American Literary History, 27(3), 417–445. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv028
Cunningham, S. & Sinclair, J. (eds.) (2001). Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Düring, M., Romanello, M., Ehrmann, M., Beelen, K. Guido, D., Deseure, B., Bunout, E., Keck J. & Apostolopoulos, P. (2023). impresso Text Reuse at Scale: An Interface for the Exploration of Text Reuse Data in Semantically Enriched Historical Newspapers. Frontiers in Big Data, 6, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2023.1249469
Faist, T. (2000). The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces. Clarendon
Garvey, E.G. (2012). Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Oxford University Press.
Hellström, S. (2010). Isidor Kjellberg och hans tid. Östergötlands länsmuseum.
Hoerder, D. (2002). Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium. Duke University Press.
Hofmeyr, I. & Peterson, D. R., (2019). The Politics of the Page: Cutting and Pasting in South African and African-American newspapers. Social Dynamics, 45(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2019.1589333
Hickerson, A. & Gustafson, K. L. (2016). Revisiting the Immigrant Press. Journalism, 17(8), 943–960. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884914542742
Høyer S. & Pöttker H. (ed.). (2005). Diffusion of the News Paradigm 1850–2000, Nordicom.
Høyer, S. (2005). The Idea of the Book: Introduction. In S. Høyer & H. Pöttker (eds.), Diffusion of the news paradigm 1850–2000, (pp. 9–16). Nordicom.
Jarlbrink, J. (2015). Mobile/Sedentary: News Work Behind and Beyond the Desk. Media History, 21(3), 280–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2015.1007858
Johannesson, E. (2001). Med det nya på väg (1859–1880). In K. E. Gustafsson & P. Rydén, Den svenska pressens historia, del II: Åren då allting hände (1830–1897), (pp. 126–235) Ekerlids.
Kjellberg, I. (n.d.). P.M. In Kjellbergs samling 1969:2, vol. 1. Linköpings stifts- och landsbibliotek.
Kälvemark, A-S. (1972). Reaktionen mot utvandringen: Emigrationsfrågan i svensk debatt och politik 1901–1904. Almqvist & Wiksell.
Levitt, P., & Nyberg-Sørensen, N. (2004). The Transnational Turn in Migration Studies. Global Networks, 4(3), 207–212.
Lundell, P., Salmi, H., Edoff, E., Marjanen, J., Paju P. & Rantala H. (eds.). (2023). Information Flows Across the Baltic Sea: Towards a Computational Approach to Media History. Mediehistoriskt arkiv. https://doi.org/10.54292/s6au8axqht
Lundström, G. (2001). En värld in rubriker och bilder (1897–1919). In K. E. Gustafsson & P. Rydén (eds.), Den svenska pressens historia, del III: Det moderna Sveriges spegel (1897–1945), (pp. 22–141). Ekerlids.
Manning, P. (2013). Migration in World History. Routledge.
Metcalf, A. C. (2006). Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600, University of Texas Press.
Meyrowitz, J. & Maguire, J. (1993). Media, Place, and Multiculturalism. Society, 30(5), 41–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700289
Nilsson, N. G. (1975). “Ära och lof vare interviewandet”: Studier i tidningsintervjuns historia. Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen.
Oiva, M., Nivala, A., Salmi, A., Latva, O., Jalava, M., Keck, J., Parker, J. (2019). Spreading News in 1904: The Media Coverage of Nikolay Bobrikov’s Shooting. Media History, 26(4), 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2019.1652090
Pigeon, S. (2016). Steal it, Change it, Print it: Transatlantic Scissors-and-Paste Journalism in the Ladies’ Treasury, 1857–1895. Journal of Victorian Culture, 22(1), 24–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2016.1249393
Raj, K. (2016). Go-Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators. In B. Lightman (ed), A Companion to the History of Science, (pp. 39–57). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118620762.ch3
Salmi, H., Paju, P., Rantala, H., Nivala, A., Vesanto A. & Ginter, F. (2020). The Reuse of Texts in Finnish Newspapers and Journals, 1771–1920: A digital humanities perspective. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 54(1), 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2020.1803166
Schudson, M. (1994) Question Authority: A History of the News Interview in American Journalism, 1860s–1930s. Media, Culture & Society, 16(4), 565–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344379401600403
Schudson, M. (2005). The Emergence of the Objectivity Norm in American Journalism. In S. Høyer & H. Pöttker (eds.), Diffusion of the news paradigm 1850–2000, (pp. 19–35). Nordicom.
Skarstedt, E. (1893). Letter to Isidor Kjellberg. In Kjellbergs samling 1969:2, vol. 4. Linköpings stifts- och landsbibliotek.
Stephenson, G. M. (1929). Isidor Kjellberg: Crusader. Swedish-American Historical Bulletin, August, 31–51.
Strindberg, A. (1996). Tjänstekvinnans son III–IV. Norstedts.
Söderström, A. (1910). Blixtar på tidnings-horisonten. Svenska folkets tidning.
“Text reuse in the Swedish-language press, 1645–1918”, database available at https://textreuse.sls.fi.
Van Remoortel, M. (2020). Scissors, Paste, and the Female Editor: The making of the Dutch women’s magazine De Gracieuse (1862–64). Women’s History Review, 30(4), 555–573. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2020.1773041
Vesanto, A., Nivala, A., Rantala, H., Salakoski, T., Salmi, H. & Ginter, F. (2017). Applying BLAST to Text Reuse Detection in Finnish Newspapers and Journals, 1771–1910. In Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics. Gothenburg, Sweden, 23–24 May 2017. http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/133/010/ecp17133010.pdf
Williams, A. (1991). Skribent i Svensk-Amerika: Jakob Bonggren, journalist och poet. Uppsala University Press.
Downloads
Publiceret
Citation/Eksport
Nummer
Sektion
Licens
Copyright (c) 2025 Johan Jarlbrink, Jimmy Engren
Dette værk er under følgende licens Creative Commons Navngivelse (by).
Forfattere, der publicerer deres værker via dette tidsskrift, accepterer følgende vilkår:
- Forfattere bevarer deres ophavsret og giver tidsskriftet ret til første publicering, samtidigt med at værket er omfattet af en Creative Commons Attribution-licens, der giver andre ret til at dele værket med en anerkendelse af værkets forfatter og første publicering i nærværende tidsskrift.
- Forfattere kan indgå flere separate kontraktlige aftaler om ikke-eksklusiv distribution af tidsskriftets publicerede version af værket (f.eks. sende det til et institutionslager eller udgive det i en bog), med en anerkendelse af værkets første publicering i nærværende tidsskrift.
- Forfattere har ret til og opfordres til at publicere deres værker online (f.eks. i institutionslagre eller på deres websted) forud for og under manuskriptprocessen, da dette kan føre til produktive udvekslinger, samt tidligere og større citater fra publicerede værker (se The Effect of Open Access).
