Volume 35 (2014): Edizione 2 (December 2014)

Political scandals have been observed to be increasingly common everywhere. In April 2008, the Finnish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Ilkka Kanerva, was compelled to resign because of the sensation arising from the enormous number of suggestive text messages that he had sent to a young female erotic dancer. During the scandal, the media followed this episode intensively. The present article considers what kinds of qualities for political leadership the media called for during this scandal and how these qualities were justified. The paper is based partly on quantitative but mostly on qualitative content analyses of the four most read newspapers in Finland. The results show five categories, the qualities being professional competence, personal characteristics and behaviour, trustworthiness, maintenance of relations and communication skills. The results show that the requirements imposed by the media are high, but that evaluation of professional competence is still crucial. Further, the occurrence of a scandal seems to trigger discussions on trust in politicians.

This article presents a study of how politically engaged young people use social media for political purposes. There has been a growing optimism that social media can stimulate political participation and deliberation, especially among young people. Based on focus group interviews with Norwegian teenagers, the article argues that social media have become an important platform for young people to participate in political activities. Whether the purpose is internal meetings or external mobilization, social media provide platforms for planning, reporting and communicating political activities. At the same time, politically engaged young people are hesitant about using social media for political deliberation. They are concerned about how they present themselves, and they are reluctant to stand out as highly political. One important explanation for this is that social media integrate different forms of communication and collapse social contexts. This causes teenagers to delimit controversies and try to keep political discussions to groups with more segregated audiences.

The present article analyses the mediatization of corporate power with a special focus on the work of the CEO. A review of the literature on the role of the media in corporate management, especially in the work of corporate leaders, shows how the techniques of power in corporate management have become mediatized. Different media have become increasingly important for the work of corporate leaders. More importantly, media have become tools of power. In flexible and soft capitalism, corporate power is exercised using performative and affective techniques aimed at identity and community formation. Consequently, different media are utilized as tools of corporate management and control. With regard to the mediatization of power, the case of corporate management suggests that one should look into the societal and institutional structures of power rather than into the power of the media.

The present article discusses the importance of the early years of mass communications in order to understand the shaping of them – the power of creating mass media for whole nations. It begins with references to scholars studying large nations and asks whether their results can be generalized to smaller countries. Therefore, it uses Norway as a case study. To what degree were Norway’s four major mass media – press, film, radio and television – formed institutionally in their early years? And if they were formed in this way, how long did the consequences of such a formation last? These questions have been neglected topics in research, so in order to answer them we also need to rethink the connections between the different media.

The present paper examines the debate on the future of public service broadcasting (PSB) in Norway and Sweden in the 2000s. I have analysed the discourses on PSB that dominate the public debate in the two countries, the cultural policy related to PSB, as well as the legitimizing rhetoric of the Norwegian public service broadcaster Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) and that of the Swedish public service broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT). Theoretically, the analysis draws on normative theories on the role of PSB in promoting democracy, culture and a well-functioning public sphere, as well as theories on democracy and the public sphere per se.

This article presents the results of a qualitative interview study on citizen opinion writers who are active on a citizen media website in Sweden. The study explores the writers’ experiences of participating in the alternative and citizen media landscape online, their purposes, the benefits and finally what impedes their participation. The results paint a picture of a sole grass-roots writer who aims to reach the broad political sphere using a mix of strategies to participate, oppose the mainstream media or use the Web as a writing gym. The restrictive powers they encounter are associated with mainstream media, commentators and organized debaters. This is discussed as causing a narrower public debate, less participation and less counter-hegemonic content.

Public service, ethics, objectivity, autonomy and immediacy are still often considered the core values of professional journalism. However, photojournalistic work has confronted historic changes since the advent of digitalization in the late 1980s. Professional photo-journalists have been caught manipulating news images, video production has become a major part of news photographers’ work, and newspapers freely publish photographs and videos taken by the general public.

The present article examines how news photographers negotiate these changes in photo-journalistic work practices, and how they define their professional ambitions in the digital age. Photojournalists’ articulations of professionalism are approached in relation to three digital innovations in photojournalism: digital photo editing, video production and user-generated images in newspapers. The empirical data consist of an online survey of and interviews with photojournalists in Finland. In the final analysis, it is suggested that the core ideals of photojournalism have to be renegotiated, because the work environment has changed drastically.

Public relations (PR) professionals and journalists act as builders of societies’ communication atmospheres, and their inter-relationships are of importance. The aim of the present study is to describe and compare PR professionals’ and journalists’ professional self-images and perceptions of the other group's profession in Finland. The study is part of the ProfCom project and makes use of the project's Finnish quantitative questionnaire data. The results indicate clear perception differences. PR professionals identify themselves with bond- and trust-building objectives, whereas journalists perceive marketing and financial goals as the main objectives of PR professionals. Journalists identify themselves with information sharing, criticism and service roles, whereas PR professionals perceive opinion sharing, advising and informing about scandals as the main objectives of journalists. In addition, the study indicates a need for further research on the underlying reasons for conflicting perceptions and the effects of the developing Internet communication arena on relationships between professionals.

In this conceptual article, we argue that strategic communication is a transboundary concept that captures, better than public relations does, the complex phenomenon of an organization's targeted communication processes in contemporary society. The aim of the article is twofold. First, the purpose is to describe and reflect the development and institutionalization of public relations education and research in Sweden. Second, based on the transboundary changes we see in industry, education and research, we argue that strategic communication is a conceptual and holistic framework that is more valid and relevant than public relations. Moreover, we suggest that strategic communication also integrates organizational (internal) communication as well as aspects of management theory and marketing, thus allowing us to understand, explain and criticize contemporary communication processes both inside organizations and between organizations and the surrounding society.

The article is mainly based on secondary data about the public relations industry, earlier research and a mapping of public relations education and research in Sweden.

The present article discusses the importance of the early years of mass communications in order to understand the shaping of them – the power of creating mass media for whole nations. It begins with references to scholars studying large nations and asks whether their results can be generalized to smaller countries. Therefore, it uses Norway as a case study. To what degree were Norway’s four major mass media – press, film, radio and television – formed institutionally in their early years? And if they were formed in this way, how long did the consequences of such a formation last? These questions have been neglected topics in research, so in order to answer them we also need to rethink the connections between the different media.