Volume 40 (2019): Edizione 2 (March 2019)

Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive, focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to “cultural elites”. The “cultural filter” put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing “journalistification” of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.

This study examines the media coverage of the #metoo movement in neighbouring countries Denmark and Sweden. A comparative content analysis shows differences in genres, sources and themes across the two samples. Further, the analysis shows that the coverage predominantly positioned #metoo within an individual action frame portraying sexual assault as a personal rather than societal problem in both countries. However, the individual action frame and a delegitimising frame focused on critique of #metoo were more prevalent in the Danish coverage. A framing analysis revealed four different news frames in the coverage: #metoo as (1) an online campaign connecting networked individuals, (2) part of a broader and long-standing social movement for gender justice, (3) an unnecessary campaign fuelled by cultures of political correctness and, finally, (4) a witch hunt and “kangaroo court”. Finally, we discuss and relate these findings to the political and cultural contexts of the two countries and their different historical trajectories for the institutionalisation of feminism and implementation of gender equality policies.

This article discusses the relationship between nonprofessional media participation and the professional handling of participants. It expands on the case of “Karen”, who related her life-threatening illness and patient experience in a broad range of media before transitioning into professional communications work for a health organization that required her to recruit other patient-participants. The article contributes to research on media participation by focusing on the blurred boundaries between professionals and nonprofessionals. It describes how relationships between the two can be characterized by tensions and dilemmas that are closely tied to issues of status and control. Karen’s case is instructive in the particular light it sheds on such matters and on how control over the mediated telling of a life story is exercised.

The objective of this study is to contribute knowledge about formation of political agendas on Twitter during mediated political events, using the party leaders’ debates in Sweden before the general election of 2014 as a case study. Our findings show that issues brought up during the debates were largely mirrored on Twitter, with one striking discrepancy. Contrary to our expectations, issues on the left-right policy dimension were more salient on Twitter than in the debates, whereas issues such as the environment, immigration and refugees, all tied to a liberal-authoritarian value axis, were less salient on Twitter.

This article assumes a media system perspective on the local news media structure in Norway, using a dataset of 847,487 news articles collected from 156 Norwegian news outlets in 2015–2017. Using a series of hypotheses, the analysis uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling to ascertain to what extent local journalism meets community information needs through infrastructure, output and performance. The analysis finds that the size of the publisher and the size of the community covered matter more for hard news coverage than regulatory factors. To that end, the results indicate that the Norwegian local media system is somehow shaped by the geography of the political landscape. The results and their contributions are discussed in light of media systems theory and local journalism structures.

This study marks a shift in research focus from verbal to visual aspects in crisis communication and contributes to the emerging field of visual crisis communication by exploring the use of images in the Scandinavian press when reporting on and/or commemorating a disaster. We used rhetorical arena theory (RAT) and a social semiotic approach to visual analysis to investigate how fifteen newspapers from Sweden, Norway and Denmark visualised the MS Estonia disaster ten, fifteen and twenty years after the sinking of the ship. We examined 93 images published on the anniversaries in 2004, 2009 and 2014 to determine what kinds of images accompanied the press reports and how these changed over time. The results demonstrate that the images, which changed considerably over time, represented the disaster both as an irreversible loss and as a process with a strong symbolic value.

This article studies how the Danish advocacy group for older people, Ældre Sagen (the DaneAge Association, or DAA), of which around 46 per cent of all Danes over the age of 65 are members, visually represents older people. The study gains theoretical inspiration from media and cultural-gerontological theories concerning the cultural influence of media representations of older people, and the connected perceptions of what it means to be and to grow old. The study is based on an analysis of a sample of 59 photographs that appeared on DAA’s website in the period 2016−2018. The results indicate a dominant visual representation of older people as happy, socially involved and extroverted, while representations of older people as weak, introverted and alone constitute a minority. In conclusion, the organisation visually promote a positive image of older people, at the same time as they represent them as excluded from other age groups and from culture and society in general.

The digitalization of journalism has resulted in an increased overlap between technology and journalism in the newsroom. This development has profound implications for journalism education. The present study investigates a team-based experiential learning project between journalism and computer science students in a digital feature journalism course. Using the concept of trading zones as our analytical lens, we explore the students’ thoughts and opinions regarding professional roles and boundaries as well as areas of tension and spaces of mutual understanding in the collaborative context. Using mixed methods and data from questionnaires, observations and semi-structured interviews, the study demonstrates how trading zones between journalism and computer science students varied from homogenous collaboration to heterogeneous coercion, with diverse experiences of collaboration, coordination and collapse.

Producing digital and interactive journalistic products offers unique and important new learning opportunities for journalism education. This study analysed the experiences of two pilot courses on so-called ‘newsgames’ in a Finnish university in 2015 and 2017. The data consisted of the newsgames and other materials produced by the students, student feedback concerning the course and observations of teachers throughout the project. Our analysis demonstrates how producing newsgames in the context of higher education may foster project-based learning experiences, something that has been relatively rare in traditional journalism education. Collaboration with media companies also offered valuable feedback for the students throughout the course and provided them with an opportunity to practice selling their expertise. The study highlights how interdisciplinary and project-based cooperation may benefit journalism education.