January 1960. Crisis at Dagens Nyheter (DN [The Daily News]). The two new editors, Olof Lagercrantz and Sven-Erik Larsson, stood on opposing sides in a battle of strategic importance. It was about a piece on the Church of Sweden.

Lagercrantz wanted to publish a leading piece that warned about the ethical consequences of submitting to forces outside oneself. Larsson thought that DN should be neutral in religious matters. Chairman Tor Bonnier was forced to arbitrate. Olof Lagercrantz was successful in the battle and the piece was printed. Press researcher, Stig Hadenius, recounts this story (for its time a typical newspaper crisis) in his DN monograph Dagens Nyheters historia. Tidningen och makten 1864–2000 (The Story of Dagens Nyheter. The Newspaper and the Power, 1864-2000) (2002).

Could you imagine Peter Wolodarski and Gunilla Herlitz triggering a cabinet crisis in today’s DN over a church-politics piece and calling in Jonas Bonnier as a mediator?

Maybe. Maybe not. It has happened a lot since 1960. These days, newspaper managers are assumed to be more concerned with economics and spreadsheets than with ethical and existential conflicts. In Lagercrantz and Larsson’s time it was the opposite. In fact, there were no spreadsheets. The question is whether there was any economy … yes, and one that warrants a mention.

Browsing through the collected press cuttings about Olof Lagercrantz in DN’s archives, one is struck by two things: 1. Conflicts and crises were his lifeblood. 2. None of these crises or conflicts were about economic matters, profit margins, business plans, savings or staffing plans.

Lagercrantz’s time was marked by the press still being in the ‘publicist’ paradigm. The newspaper’s most important and most powerful person was assumed to be the ‘publicist’, whose role was, ideally, identical to that of the editor. The publicist’s power was based on, and required, the ability to express oneself with assurance about past and present political, cultural and moral issues.

The big publicists’ era is heavily mythologised and there is also something legendary about the figure of Olof Lagercrantz that one encounters in Vid sidan av (In Addition To), a volume of diary entries, which was published by Wahlstrom & Widstrand (2011). Don Draper, always ready for a long lunch and a cocktail, merges with Little Red Riding Hood, always ready for an exciting trip into the forest.

We take one day in a publicist’s everyday life: it is 6 October 1960, and he has been for almost a year the editor of Sweden’s largest morning newspaper: it is the morning and Lagerkrantz is reading a novel by Lars Gustafsson. Signe Sparre visits later. He writes, as though in passing, a leading piece about a French freedom manifesto. Gunnar Ekelöf drops by. Lagercrantz leaves home and takes a taxi to the newspaper. Meeting. Then walks to Riche for an ”expensive, nice lunch” with Erik Lindegren. He then works on the paper for ”a while”. He is then picked up by his wife Martina. Dinner with Tora Dahl as a guest. Ekelöf pops in again. In the evening he makes a speech about Harry Martinson at Diakonanstalten in Stora Skondal.

“They listened intently and I spoke with force so the sweat ran down my forehead.”

So it was to be a ‘publicist’, one can imagine. Everyone listened intently to what you had to say and you never had to think about how the bill would be paid. Today, Draper and the boys from the creative department have been put in twelve-step programmes, and Little Red Riding Hood has been devoured by the wolf from the executive floor. It is, in any case, how one could describe the ‘publicist’s’ transformation into a ‘publisher’. One could also use Marxist concepts and conclude that the power in the media was previously with the managers of the ideological superstructure, but that it is now definitely with the representatives of the economic base.

Once it was almost inconceivable that a person without solid political or cultural credentials could become the editor of a major newspaper. Today, it is equally unlikely that a person without a management background, or who is incapable of making harsh economic decisions, will get this ultimate editorial responsibility. Ideologues are still there, but they can no longer hope for the king’s crown. They must be content to be opinion ambassadors, with the task of representing their editors on panels and morning sofas.

A small, classic scene from Anders Ehnmark and P.O. Enquist’s play Chez Nous from the late seventies, features the editor of a large tabloid paper (easily recognised as Expressen [The Express]), playing with his new Rank Xerox copier when he is visited by the troubled night manager, Melin. He wonders how to handle a story where journalistic ambitions seem to clash with the paper’s own company interests. The editor is himself more interested in teaching Melin how to make self-portraits by pressing his face against the copier glass, but then gives a little lecture about the relationship between circulation and freedom. The newspaper has an owner. The owner demands ”sound business principles”, i.e., a return on investment. If he does not get it, he will become disgruntled and then take back the power he has lent to his editors. This is the starting point.

But, says the editor, ”of course we are not primarily interested in making money for the owner. [—] As journalists, we are made in a different way. When we have something in our hearts, we want to get it said, right?”

Mmm, and how will this be accomplished?

”I have already said. The worse the circulation, the greater the power of the owner. The more he puts himself into things, the smaller is our freedom. Conversely, the owner’s power is diminished when the circulation is soaring. It’s rising today, Melin, thanks to you. This increases our freedom. If the circulation shoots up, then the owner has nothing left to say. […] We are creating our freedom for ourselves… by creating a selling product. This freedom is achieved at a certain level of circulation. If we exceed this level, we can realise our ideas, give vent to our convictions.”

Commercialism, in other words, is the goal of free, ethical journalism.

When representatives of the media speak today, one often feels that the relationship now is the reverse or, rather, that profitability has become both the sole means and goal of the business.

One expression of this is an ongoing power-shift in the industry that I would describe as a Sovietisation. It is manifest in an over-reliance on uniformity and centralisation. In the world of newspapers, there has been a shift in power from editors to newspaper management; in the leadership of the paper, from editor to director; and in the corporations, from the individual newspapers to corporate leadership. The politburo’s power is growing. It is not good for journalism. It probably is not even good for corporations.

Top-down empires have a series of internal weaknesses. Wrong decisions and delusions are magnified exponentially as they propagate from top to bottom. Systems where everyone turns their eyes up toward one leader are at once static and fragile.

The matter is not helped by the fact that media executives increasingly talk about their work as if it were a just another branch of industry among others, branches that only require profitability so that they can maintain their own and their employees’ positions.

This has not always been the case.

When Sydsvenska Dagbladet, in the 1950s, had plans to move parts of its operation to a site in Malmo’s industrial port, the then-Deputy CEO, Gustaf Andren, said no, arguing that a newspaper is not a usual factory, and that it was not ”some industry that can be placed anywhere where transport facilities are good […] a newspaper is to be regarded as a social institution. It cannot be based, for example, in a city hall or a city library in an industrial port”.

Sydsvenska Dagbladet instead built a modernist skyscraper on a narrow isthmus between Malmo’s impressive rail yard and the highway to Lund. The Le Corbusier-inspired building was principally paid for in cash, and filled with modern art and design. Sydsvenska Dagbladet was not just an industrial company in the media sector, but also a modernist exclamation mark.

Nowadays, Sydsvenskan Hall in Segevang is rather a cultural monument, a reminder that the world has not always been the same as now. This role is shared between the newspaper building in Malmo and the manor in Angelsberg, Vastmanland. Engelsberg is now a carefully restored industrial landmark on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list. The industrial activities started there back in the 1600s and lasted until 1919. It was later shut down, a victim of the new era.

That the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson’s Foundation’s conference on “endangered opinion-journalism” – in February this year – took place there, was fitting. It is not difficult to imagine the publicist as the hammering blacksmith of our time, a museum figure with a romantic glow. It is not difficult to imagine the newspaper factories and television buildings as our time’s death row inmates. This was why most of the prominent media industry figures who attended the conference, in spite of the title, rather spoke about the threats to the industry than about the threat to journalistic ethics.

One can, in a way, understand this priority. If polar bears on shrinking ice floes could attend a conference, they would also prefer to talk about the urgent ice situation than about Olof Lagercrantz and Herbert Tingsten. And it really seems as though the media’s ice floe is shrinking.

Some figures: on August 29, 1973, the day after the Norrmalmstorg robbery, Expressen sold 921,000 newspapers, and this was in the days when Kvällsposten (KvP [The Evening Post]) and GT were still independent tabloids with large circulations. Aftonbladet, which was then still number two in the evening press market, sold 680,000 copies. Add to this KvP’s and GT’s circulations, and it can be seen that the tabloids’ total sales on this day should have been somewhere around two million copies, in a country with just over eight million people.

It was, of course, an extreme and unusual situation, driven by an extreme event (the hostage crisis in Kreditbanken), but as late as the turn of the 1980s and 90s, Expressen’s circulation lay somewhere around 580,000 – 590,000 per release date, while GT and KvP sold around 100,000 copies each.

Last year, Expressen, including the editions of GT and KvP, had an average circulation of just over 260,000 copies. Two-thirds of the total circulation has vanished.

Now there are other numbers with which to console oneself if you are a media bear, numbers that take into account the fact that competition in the industry today is somewhat different than in the 1980s, when they printed the newspapers and did not have so many other competitors other than two channels of public television and a little jovial satellite television from London.

Nowadays newspaper editors talk rather about reach than circulation. The web has made it possible to access even readers who do not like to get ink on their fingers. Everyone knows it and acts accordingly. The catch is that almost no one knows how to reach all the way down into these readers’ wallets.

Last summer, I witnessed a nightmare scene for any journalist with a minimum of survival instinct:

Bromma airport. We trudge out to board the Malmo plane. Behind me are two young men. One of them picked up a newspaper at the gate.

– “Are you collecting adult points?” asks his friend.

– “Well, I’m not going to read it. But I like anything that’s free.”

One’s worst fears are thus confirmed. Though young people can read, in spite of twelve years in Swedish schools, they do not want to read newspapers. If they want to read newspapers, they do not want to pay. It is this that is the threat: they will not pay, they will not pay!

Internet evangelists, in recent years, have preached about social media’s glorious kingdom with such fervour that one might get the idea that soon it will only be Bjorn Ranelid who cares about what is written in the newspapers. Not so. Despite the massive digital competition, a surprising number of papers are being read in Sweden. A so-called ‘SOM report’ from 2009, compiled by the press researcher Ulrika Hedman, showed that the total circulation of printed newspapers has remained almost at the same level since the 1980s. The explanation for this is the free papers; when you discount them, the picture is different. The total circulation for daily newspaper subscriptions is sinking slowly but surely, in step with the natural attrition of the increasingly senior core readership.

The sector is walking, so to speak, literally, in the valley of the shadow of death.

This long-established fact more or less constitutes the basis for most of the contributions at the Engelsberg mansion. But, at the same time, speaker after speaker, one media heavyweight after another, testified that for their own business the situation was the opposite: glorious times, glorious profits.

This paradox is confirmed when you take a look at the industry website Medievärlden’s (The Media World’s) review of media companies’ financial statements for 2011. The headlines herald a festive fanfare rather than a requiem: ”DN increase profits”, ”DI are the top performers”, ”Svenska Dagbladet gets the result”, ”Aftonbladet’s strongest quarter ever” … Expressen’s earnings did decline compared with 2010, but ended up anyway with pre-tax profits of 115 million SEK. The black sheep of the flock was Sydsvenskan, which reported a loss of 75 million SEK, but of this sum nearly 70 million SEK were ‘structural costs’ associated with a great savings package in 2010, that is to say buyout money and other things, and the CEO, Lars Dahmen, is already projecting a modest profit of 30 million SEK in 2012.

Thomas Mattsson, Expressen’s editor-in-chief, and one of the industry’s few remaining newspaper romantics, was perhaps right when he, during the conference at Engelberg, stated: ”We are not in a crisis of the industry”. But it depends on how you define the term ‘crisis’ and what one means when talking about the industry.

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It is easy to forget, but ‘the media’ and ‘journalism’ are not the same. Neither are ‘the media’ and ‘journalistic ethics’. ‘The media’ is a segment of the industry, a technically and economically defined quantity. ‘Journalism’ and ‘journalistic ethics’ are terms and conditions for a particular way of relating to the world: the tradition emanating from the Enlightenment, which posits that every person should have the opportunity to realise themselves as individuals and as members of society. Journalism and journalistic ethics’ base is neither the newspaper page or screen, nor the editorial floor of DN, but the idea of ??a general openness in the formation of ideas and knowledge.

Whether individual media companies survive or die is a primary concern for their employees and owners, but for the degree of civilisation in the world, there are no automatic or profound implications. The toilet cleaners, the so-called ‘night collectors’, have been driven off the toilet seat. The oil crisis killed off the Swedish yards. It happens all the time. Companies and industries come and go, but the reasonably decent society remains.

So why worry about the future of the press?

One can certainly, theoretically, imagine an ethical journalism without major journalism companies. Many internet enthusiasts like to imagine precisely that, and it makes them strangely elated. They look forward with anticipation to the day when the ‘congregation’ has left the ‘major churches’ in favour of social media ‘chapels’. But there is something worth considering in the traditional, institutional journalism that still dominates the media (the Facebook frenzy aside). A national old-media institution such as Rapport (Report) had 1,163,000 viewers per broadcast at 19:30 in 2005; six years later, 1,103,000 of them still remained. And it is despite the abundant Twitter feeds, that the major editorial organisations – mainly morning and evening papers – still set the agenda of the political and cultural debate, including that which takes place on Twitter.

It is the same with the newspapers as with the universities. They play an important role as stewards of the traditions, values, norms, practices, rules, solutions to problems, expectations, ideals, and so on. Sydsvenska Dagbladet’s old vice president was right: a newspaper is not just an industry but also, like a university, a social institution. But it is also an industry. One is a prerequisite for the other. Always has been.

The pioneers of liberal, ethical journalism in Sweden – Aftonbladet’s founder Lars Johan Hierta and his protégé, Rudolf Wall, the man who started DN – did not produce newspapers just because they wanted to change Sweden, but also because they wanted to become wealthy. The most successful newspaper companies have been driven by this dialectic between the urge to get something said, and their eagerness to get as much as possible sold. Expressen is perhaps the clearest example in Sweden of a newspaper that combines journalistic and pecuniary incentives in a productive way. The editor-in-chief of Chez Nous is the subject of satire, yet still has a point: it is really the case that circulation and journalistic freedom have an intimate relationship to each other.

That is why, in a media company, there should continue to be a constructive conflict between the editor and director, between ideology and business. If one side starts to monopolise power, things can go bad.

When DN, in 1973, bought Svensk Filmindustri (Swedish Film Industry), the newspaper’s chief editor, Olof Lagercrantz, protested eagerly and publicly. The reasons were media politics, but Lagercrantz also took the opportunity, in an interview, to reject the purchase on a commercial basis. He claimed that the DN should invest its money in very different areas, ”such as shipyards.”

It was an assessment, made in the year of the oil crisis, which makes one realise the value of those other than publishers, skilled directors, for example, that have influence over the publishing company.

Now, however, the balance of power in newspaper companies has been reversed. And it is not beneficial.

The publisher has been replaced by the surgeon, who is constantly at work with knife and bone-saw, who is good at cutting costs, but without the ability to formulate other stories than those relating to financial indicators; in the short term, it may be necessary. In any case, thanks to amputations (reductions in workforce) and other cutbacks, media companies have successfully rescued their profitability. But saving strategies nevertheless raise questions: how many austerity packages equal a single editorial, that is, how long can they make their money mainly by getting rid of their employees?

And if one is constantly talking about, and managing, newspaper companies as if they were any other industry, does one not then risk the world taking one at one’s word, shrugging its shoulders and saying that it is indeed sad that fine old newspapers and fine old Saab factories disappear, but such is the reality? If one always speaks and acts, as if the only important thing is the profit margin, how does one convince subscribers, newsstand buyers and viewers that the real essence of a journalistic company is not the company itself but journalism, and that this is worth the price?

The greatest threat to journalistic ethics today may well turn out to be the media industry’s eagerness to save itself at all costs. This zeal may also prove to be the biggest threat also to the industry.