This article explores how nine Swedish cultural editors and managers in mainstream media institutions define cultural journalism and its political dimensions during times of increased digitization and media convergence. Swedish cultural journalism is aesthetic and political critique applied to subject areas (music, literature, etc.) and contemporary societal and ethical issues. Drawing on Zelizer we ask whether there is a common interpretive community of cultural journalists in different media regarding: (1) how they define their scope, (2) how they understand "the political" in cultural journalism and its implications for democracy, and (3) how they view media convergence and digitalization. We find that although editors/managers from different media share a basic understanding of cultural journalism as an alternative perspective to news, "the political" in cultural journalism is approached differently in the press and the public service broadcast media. Furthermore, due in part to structural conditions, they also see the effects of digitization differently, forming sub-communities on two counts. This study thus contributes new knowledge to a field previously focused almost exclusively on newspapers.

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This article examines the media event as relocated to public viewing areas (PVAs) erected in cities across the globe, where people gather to watch the events together live on-screen. The study is based on ethnographic research carried out in PVAs located in selected cities during the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the 2012 Summer Olympics. We examine the relationships between these events, as reconstituted in these different locations through media networks, and the public’s participation via the event on-screen. The PVA emerges as a new location of experience and participation, with its own histories as a place of attraction for the local public and for visitors from afar, in what D. Massey would describe as an ‘intersection of local and global social relations’. The host city arena is no longer the self-evident ‘centre’ for this event, which has been pluralized through the complex web of media structures and the activities of participants who come to experience the event in these other, dispersed locations.

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Cultural journalism is a subfield of journalism that encompasses what is known as arts journalism. While arts journalism is characterized by reviews, critique, news, and essays about the arts and popular culture, cultural journalism has a broader take on culture, including lifestyle issues, societal debate, and reflective ethical discussion by cultural personas or expressed in a literary style. Both arts and cultural journalists see their work as “journalism with a difference,” evoking different perspectives and worldviews from those dominating mainstream news reporting. At the same time, cultural journalism shares with journalism issues like boundary work, genre blurring, digitalization, globalization, professionalization, and “the crisis of journalism.” There are three main ways cultural journalism has been studied: one research strand defines cultural journalism as material produced by the cultural desks or material that is explicitly labelled cultural journalism; another defines it as journalism about culture, regardless of how it is labelled or produced; and a third strand includes only arts journalism, examining journalistic content on the fine arts and popular culture. Studies from all of these approaches are included in this article due to the effort to include a wide variety of countries at different time periods and an effort to track joint defining features and developments in cultural journalism. The emphasis is on the Nordic context, where the term “cultural journalism” is well established and where research is relatively comprehensive. The research is divided into three themes: the cultural public sphere and the contribution to democracy; cultural journalism’s professionalism and the challenges of digitalization; and transnational and global aspects of cultural journalism, including tendencies such as cultural homogenization and hybridization. International research on cultural journalism as a subfield has been complicated by its varying designations (arts journalism, feuilleton, journalism about culture, entertainment), and its numerous aesthetic forms, disciplines, or types of culture, all of which are changing over time. Despite these issues, research points in the same direction: the amount of cultural journalism is increasing, and the boundaries against other types of journalism are becoming more porous. There is also a decline in editorial autonomy. In common with journalism, there is an increase in generalists working with culture and greater central managerial control in new multiplatform media organizations. The research points to an increase in a more transnationally oriented cultural journalism, mainly through a larger share of cultural news and popular culture—while its core, review and critique, has changed in character, or arguably lost ground. The increasing “newsification” of cultural journalism should prompt future research on whether the “watchdog” role vis-à-vis the cultural industries is growing. New forms of art and culture are beginning to get coverage, but also, in some cases, the intermixing of “lifestyle” with cultural journalism. The commercialization and celebrity aspects of this are clear, but new digital platforms have also enabled new voices and different formats of cultural journalism and a wider dissemination and intensity in cultural debates, all of which emphasize its democratic potential. New research on this subject appears to focus on the longitudinal changes in cultural journalism, the implications of digitalization and globalization, and cultural journalism in broadcasting.

In the last decade, large public screens and globally organized public viewing areas (PVAs) have become increasingly significant elements of media events, expanding the possibilities for mass audiences to collectively watch events together in real time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in connection with the British Royal wedding (2011) and the London Olympics (2012), this article explores the ‘sociality’ of public space broadcasting, focusing on interactions and performances of identity by people gathered for collective viewing in the city centres of London, Birmingham and Manchester. The analysis shows that public space broadcasting mobilizes a variety of social identities and performances, spanning from ‘relaxed’ forms of engagement to more fannish articulations of nationality, cosmopolitan hybridity and spectacle participation. Geographical location and structural embedding strategies clearly impinge on public performances within PVAs. The article concludes that the degree of commercialization and presence of journalists and other media professionals are particularly central external drivers of performativity in connection with public consumption of media events.