The intention of this BA-thesis was to study how two daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and The New York Times, use press photos in their news reporting during one week. The purpose was to analyze how similar the newspapers are and how they differ when it comes to the use of press photos. This has been examinee through comparing the press photos in the national, international and local sections of the papers. We chose to focus on how much the papers visualize their news and what kind of pictures the photo editors decide to publish. The method we applied was quantitative content analysis. To get a deeper understanding concerning the use of press photos we also interviewed two photo editors and two photographers.

The study was guided by theories like the media logic, news valuation, tabloidization and semiotics. Our empirical material contains 454 press photos from 14 different editions. Our results indicate that Dagens Nyheter and The New York Times generally publish two press photos per page devoted to editorial text. A big difference between the two newspapers is that Dagens Nyheter uses the biggest and the smallest photos while The New York Times tends to publish photos of a middle size. The newspapers ordinary photographers take the majority of the photos and the most visualized news topic is politics. Politicians and regular people are the most widely represented groups in the press photos. We can also see that The New York Times publish more action pictures than Dagens Nyheter, which in its turn mainly use portraits and landscapes photos. The only action pictures that Dagens Nyheter publishes are placed in the international section. When it comes to the head photos on the newspapers frontages our results show that Dagens Nyheter publish a lot bigger photos than The New York Times, which indicates that the Swedish paper is more affected by tabloidization.