Volume 44 (2023): Edizione 2 (June 2023)

Audience metrics in journalism can be seen as a disruptive innovation: a technological invention that boosts journalism but at the same time disturbs it. The use of metrics has therefore drawn journalists into a sensitive sense-making process: They do emotional work to be able to manage the metrics-related requirements of their work. To further assess why metrics in Finland remains a sensitive issue, in this article we ask: 1) What is the Finnish news professionals’ emotional work about metrics directed at? 2) What is the relationship between this emotional work and the cycle of disruption and innovation? The empirical material consists of nine qualitative interviews with Finnish news managers and a set of open-ended survey responses from the editorial staff of the largest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat. In addition, eight background interviews with third-party analytics providers were used as supportive material. We conclude that the emotional work is centred on relief, excitement, and stress, and it is directed at seeing the audience as an algorithmic conception, increasing the organisations’ capabilities through learning, and maintaining autonomy, respectively. Emotional work thus alleviates and stimulates, as well as balances journalism's relationship with the disruptive innovation of metrics.

In recent years, politicians and political parties have increasingly adopted various social media as political communication platforms. While the research on the topic has provided valuable knowledge about politicians’ use of these platforms and the immediate effects, the literature has mainly studied the usage in isolation from their broader communication with citizens. This article provides an overview of the emerging literature that examines politicians’ social media usage in a broader context. Through a scoping review of 49 studies published between 2008 and November 2022, the study identifies three main themes and seven subthemes in the literature and calls for more research to build more robust knowledge across different study contexts. In particular, the review emphasises a need for more longitudinal and qualitative perspectives to assess how politicians navigate between competing media logics in a hybrid media environment, how the new reality impacts them, and whether it alters their communication with citizens over time.

The overall aim of this study is to explore the authoritarian dimension in the far-right discourse of online forums. The study argues for a focus on the articulations of authoritarianism to understand the dynamics of far-right discourse. Four central features of authoritarianism are identified and explored: 1) the authoritarian values underlying articulated opinions on diverse issues; 2) the emotional dimension of authoritarianism; 3) the coexistence of civil and uncivil articulations of authoritarianism; and 4) the role of mainstream news as reference for and trigger of authoritarian responses. The qualitative study is based on data from two Swedish forums, Flashback and Familjeliv [Family life], and consists of 79 threads related to three issues on the agenda: disorder in school, gang crime, and transgender. The results show expressions of authoritarian–liberal value conflicts, and, most significantly, the vigour of an authoritarian culture on the forums, with implications for the normalisation of far-right discourse.

As on-demand media claim an increasing amount of the time we spend on digital media, traditional broadcasters have adopted video on-demand (VoD) services as a means of presenting their programmes. This article analyses two Danish VoD services offered by legacy broadcasters – that is, BVoD services. It argues that the traditional features of broadcast television, to communicate liveness and immediacy, are reappropriated in the publishing practices of the BVoD services. With an analytical focus on the use of temporal paratexts, the article finds that whereas both services emphasise liveness and immediacy in their publishing practices, they apply different means of expressing the temporal qualities. These differences can be attributed to organisational differences. Finally, the article concludes that competitiveness, distinctiveness, and the public service identity of the broadcasters are explanatory factors for the reappropriation of time-structured publishing in the two Danish BVoD services DRTV and TV 2 Play.

This article highlights and discusses the main findings from three different media production studies (2016, 2019, and 2022) investigating the changing production culture of the schedulers in public service media. The inclusion of a broadcaster video-on-demand (BVoD) service in the broadcaster's portfolio affected the production culture. First, the article argues that profound changes happened to the organisational framing of the BVoD service's status and its impact on the production practices. Second, the article shows the BVoD service's impact on the content priorities among the schedulers at TV 2 in Denmark and third, how the public service branding of TV 2 became more explicit in the production culture. However, across these three points of impact and the shifts in the strategic focus at TV 2, the business model at TV 2 and its interplay with the public service obligations runs as an undercurrent.

News media share gatekeeping power with social media platforms and audiences in the digital news environment. This means news media is no longer the sole gatekeeper when gatekeeping is viewed post-publication, that is after news content has been published and entered circulation. In this study, we approach interacting and commenting on social media as post-publication gatekeeping practices. This means gatekeeping materialises as and in social interaction, as conversational gatekeeping. We engaged in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Instagram posts and comments on Finnish newspapers’ Instagram accounts during a period of one year (April 2019–March 2020) to explore how conversational gatekeeping emerges in the increasingly visual and multimodal social media environment. We contribute to the emerging stream of post-publication gatekeeping research by showing how multimodal Instagram content initiated four different styles of performing conversational gatekeeping: affirmative, critical, corrective, and invitational styles. Our typology helps to understand the social interactional relationship between news media and their audiences in general, as well as the micro-level practices of post-publication gatekeeping in particular.

Over the last decade, the news media increasingly seem to have become a target for politically motivated criticism seeking to delegitimise the news media. The prevalence of delegitimising media criticism is, however, unclear. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which Swedish members of parliament (MPs) engage in delegitimising media criticism on Twitter, the party distribution of those engaging in such media criticism, and the targets and expressions of such media critique. Among other things, the findings show that when MPs tweet about the news media, they are more likely to be critical than supportive, and that a clear majority of tweets that are critical toward the news media contain delegitimising media criticism. Moreover, the results show that MPs from the political right – in particular the Moderate Party and the Sweden Democrats – are most active in tweeting delegitimising media criticism, and that the most common target is public service media.

This article contributes to the literature on political agenda-setting on social media in the local context. Using interviews with local politicians in northern Norway, we discuss local politicians’ use of social media for agenda-setting in between elections from an agency perspective. We ask whether local politicians seek to promote and control the definition of an issue on social media, and whether local politicians are influenced by citizens’ opinions on these platforms. We find that local politicians do take advantage of social media in the agenda-setting process, both for problem definition and to sell their ideas. Our findings reveal that local politicians use social media to bypass traditional media for political messaging and that they are sensitive to public opinion on Facebook. Furthermore, there is evidence in our study of online debates brought into formal policymaking processes.