Tom 35 (2014): Zeszyt s1 (August 2014)

Credibility is frequently represented as both an ideal goal for journalism as a profession and as an integral part of the news industry’s survival strategy. Yet there is no widely accepted operationalization of the concept of credibility. In the current article, we present the results of a study of credibility in Danish news media. Credibility is defined at an institutional level by two dimensions: A) the accuracy and reliability of the news stories featured in leading Danish news media, and B) journalists’ knowledge and understanding of the Danish code of press ethics. The results show that sources only find objective errors in 14.1% of the news stories, which is a lower figure than most other studies report. The results also show that Danish journalists find bad press ethics to be an increasing problem and attribute this problem to increased pressure in the newsroom.

In the present article, we investigate socialization practices in the newsroom. The analyses demonstrate how journalist trainees are socialized into this particular professional culture and community of practice. Theoretically, we combine traditional news ethnography with linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and theories of profession in order to investigate and interpret social and cultural (re)production in the routinized practice in the newsroom. The units of analysis are interactions between journalist trainees and their editors concerning ideas for news stories. These interactions play a key role in the socialization process as important loci for learning about the craft because of the constant reinforcement of competent practice which takes place here. Thus, these interactions are important sites for cultural production and reproduction that support the building of professional vision.

Five biennial surveys from 2005 to 2013 reveal a high degree of stability in Norwegian newspaper executives’ attitudes towards digital media, despite a high turnover in the executive ranks. Editors and managers do not approve fully of their own organizations’ online activities, and they struggle to find a balanced focus between traditional and new activities. However, the rationale for online publishing has become less blurred through the period, and an important shift in the strategic development of user fees is reviled: While it was driven by perceived threats from 2005 to 2011, opportunities for the industry is the strongest predictor in 2013.

During recent years, the concept of mediatization has made a strong impact on media and communication studies, and its advocates have attempted to turn it into a refined and central theoretical framework for media research. The present article distinguishes two forms of mediatization theory: a strong form based on the assumption that a ‘media logic’ increasingly determines the actions of different social institutions and groups, and a weak form that questions such a logic, though the latter form emphasizes the key role of the media in social change and singles out mediatization as a central ‘meta-process’ today. Exponents of the weak form have convincingly criticized the notion of media logic. However, the weaker version of mediatization is itself problematic, as its advocates have failed to produce a clear explanatory framework around the concept. We argue that, although the analytical status of mediatization is unclear, fascination with the concept will, in all probability, continue in the years to come, due to the promises of heightened disciplinary coherence and status that this notion has conveyed for media and communication studies.

In a climate of growing public concern and monitoring of business’s impact on the environment, corporations and industry groups have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their environmental reputation and to influence the outcome of environmental debates in the public sphere. In this article, we provide an exploratory overview of how the largest Swedish corporations selectively subsidise environmental news-making by supplying it with promotional materials disguised as journalistic copy. We analyse a year’s worth of public relations output from the largest 15 companies traded in the Stockholm exchange or owned by the Swedish state, in order to shed light on the environmental themes they cover, the techniques they adopt to maximise the likelihood of media coverage and the evidence they provide to support their claims. Our analysis shows that corporate voices make substantial use of environmental and ecological arguments in their strategic communication, but they provide little useful information about the company’s impact and do not usually foster forms of dialogic stakeholder engagement.

In this article we present a preliminary theoretical background and some empirical findings concerning a migrating trend between the fields of politics, PR and journalism: one day a political reporter, the next a communication officer; one day a PR consultant, the next a state secretary. To understand contemporary politics one must, we argue, comprehend the convergence between three fields of power holders that together form the realm of politics and communication: elite politicians, elite political reporters and elite communication/PR officers. Together, they form a communication elite that sets the parameters for the public discourse on politics. When politics is produced and constructed in, and through, social networks formed by elite agents from politics, journalism and PR, what does this mean for how democracy is worked out and what does it mean for citizenship in general?

The theme of this article is how the Cold War influenced the media – but also how the media influenced the Cold War. In order to study this, the article connects Norwegian media to the broader international Cold War history between 1945 and 1991. The aim is to show the relevance of the Cold War for media development and of the media for research on the Cold War. The goal is to construct a tentative fundament for further research on the role of the media during the Cold War.

The article discusses the celebrity humanitarian as media construction. Departing from a discussion of celebrification, the article argues that celebrities in public roles outside the field of entertainment are inevitably framed by and structured in accordance with celebrity logic. The article discusses how celebrity humanitarianism is a contested field, which, in order for a particular activity to support the celebrity persona, relies heavily on strategies of authentification. Finally, the article shows how information about a photograph of Angelina Jolie from her trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in March 2013 is transformed and translated into gossip about the star’s private life when discussed by users on a celebrity site.

The user-generated wiki encyclopedia Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia has become the world's largest wiki encyclopedia, and behind many of its entries are interesting stories of creation, or rather intercreation, since Wikipedia is produced by a large number of contributors. Using the slogan “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Wikipedia 2013), Wikipedia invites everyone to participate, but the participants do not necessarily represent all kinds of individuals or interests – there might be an imbalance affecting the content as well as the perspective conveyed. As a phenomenon Wikipedia is quite complex, and can be studied from many different angels, for instance through the articles’ history and the edits to them.

This paper is based on a study of Featured Articles from the Swedish Wikipedia. Three articles, Fri vilja [Free will], Fjäll [Fell], and Edgar Allan Poe, are chosen from a list of Featured Articles that belongs to the subject field culture. The articles’ development has been followed from their very first versions in 2003/2004 to edits made at the end of 2012.

The aim is to examine the creation, or intercreation, processes of the articles, and the collaborative production. The data come from non-article material such as revision history pages, article material, and some complementary statistics. Principally the study has a qualitative approach, but with some quantitative elements.

Despite the fragmentation of audience behaviour and the pluralization of platforms within the media cultures of the digital age, cultural memory practices retain an important feature: They echo a basic existential quest for communitas. The present article compares two seemingly incomparable regimes of memory of our time: the anniversaries of 9.11 on Swedish television and web communities of commemoration of lost loved ones. It suggests through these contrasting examples that existential themes are pursued in the face of three challenges: the temporality of instantaneity, the all-pervasive networked individualism that makes memory into a matter of elective affinities, and the technological capacities that subject memory to endless revision. The article explores the existential dimension of these memory practices in line with research within the culturalist emphasis on the study of media and religion. This debate recognizes the need for a broader understanding of the mediated qualities of religion and the religious qualities of the media. The article argues that both televisual anniversaries of trauma that invite audiences to an annual return, and our new multiple and fragmented media memories compel us to conceive of our hyper-contingent, late-modern digital age as a quest for meaning, transcendence and cohesion – for what Victor Turner (1969) called existential communitas.

Some media forms we primarily take in with our senses, like movies, music or text. Other media forms are more like activities that we have to carry out with our body such as digital games on the PC, console, smart phone or tablet. Here, we are not allowed to sit still and take media in with our senses. In order to grasp this otherness and uniqueness of digital games it is not sufficient to re-use adapted media theories, concepts, methods and ways of writing. This article is written on the realization that the theories and methods we approach a research area, activity or experience with will set the boundaries of our understanding. And the ways we represent our understanding in writing to others will subsequently set the boundaries of their understanding. In this way, the article is an attempt of erecting boundaries in new ways and placing them in unfamiliar places through the use of alternative and alien methods, theories and styles of writing. This is done in order to let new formations of studying, thinking and talking about activities and experiences in highly interactive media emerge.

The relationship between the fantasy genre and the medium of computer games has always been a very tight-knit one. The present article explores the close connection between fantasy and computer games through different media, arguing that the fantasy genre's specific ‘mode of function’ is the ability to build complete fictional worlds, whereby it creates specific experiences for its users. Based on empirical data from focus group interviews with players of the most popular Western Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) of all times, World of Warcraft, the article develops the concept of worldness as an experiential, phenomenological understanding of player experience. I discuss how this way of framing a core quality of the fantasy genre (of world-building) functions across single fictional universes and aims to grasp a specific fantasy experience of being in the world. This experience works on the level of genre, by anchoring the specific fantasy world in the larger, surrounding fantasy genre matrix.

This article looks at surround sound in contemporary cinema, with the aim of discussing practices of sound design and, more particularly, pinpointing a ‘best practice’ of surround sound today – focusing here on the practices in the US. The empirical starting point for the analysis is a study of ten Oscar-nominated movies, analysing their soundtracks and especially comparing their stereo and surround versions. The method can be described as a ‘directional’ listening mode, analysing how the different channels and speakers are used when presenting sonic elements like voices, music, atmospheres and sound effects.