This article explores the specific features of Instagram as a platform for visual political communication. Drawing on theories of mediatization and celebrity politics, it analyses how various forms of symbolic connectivity are expressed and performed by sixteen leading politicians in Sweden, and moreover how their social media use relates to news media. The study leans on a content analysis (n=800) and results show that journalism still holds a strong symbolic value, even when politicians are in charge of the political discourse. In addition, it reveals how the platform logic of Instagram contributes to the formation of digital lifestyle politics, where symbolic connections between politicians and a variety of actors are staged through new mediatized relations. Visual political communication does inherit a democratic and interactive potential. However, according to the analysed data, most politicians avoid public interaction. Instead, they are preoccupied with the branding of their public persona.
The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, with a particular focus on transformations in genres, text types and thematic repertoires. Drawing on a constructed week sample from press, television and radio during four decades (1985, 1995, 2005, 2015), we address three aspects of ‘the crisis discourse’ of cultural journalism: (1) the potential decline in cultural coverage due to economic cutbacks and downsized cultural desks; (2) cultural journalism’s perceived ‘quality crisis’ connected to transformations of thematic repertoires; and (3) the alleged decline of cultural expertise related to changes in cultural journalism’s generic structures. The study makes a unique contribution to cultural journalism scholarship by identifying media-specific differences and complementary relationships between media forms, building on media ecology and genre theory. In contrast to the crisis discourse, results show that cultural journalism has expanded significantly through popularization and thematic and generic diversification, but the transformations are different in press, radio and television due to differing role positions in the larger media ecosystem. In addition, some parts of the cultural journalism media ecology appear to be endangered.
In the present global media climate, speed and immediacy are increasingly prioritised characteristics of news production. As online news has developed, the idea of a single news item has been replaced by fast-changing content and new repertoires of constructing 'Breaking News'. Whereas most research of online news has used synchronic rather than diachronic methods, this article introduces a new approach, which we choose to call Regular Interval Content Capture (RICC). The data produced by RICC enables dynamic online media texts to be studied as they are produced, edited, and changed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In our study, the US 'Crucial Tuesday' primary elections serve as the empirical example. From a discourse analytical perspective, we analyse a total of 64 hours of online news flows collected from the US and International editions of CNN.com. The RICC approach allows us to find major representational differences between the two editions. Three different modes of writing, characterising different stages of CNN's reporting, were identified.
Over the past decade, data journalism has received considerable attention among scholars, pointing to novel forms of investigative reporting as well as new daily practices of news production. This study contributes to existing scholarship by conceptualizing data journalism through distinctions between hard and soft news in relation to service journalism. We analyze news produced by specialized data desks in Swedish public service organizations over a 5-year period (2015–2019) and propose a model for how service journalism attributes can be used as a bridge between the binary categories of hard and soft in data journalism. With this model, we point to how data journalism in public service organizations challenges established notions of soft and hard news and how hybrid production practices open up new research trajectories concerning the societal significance of news in the digital age.
Over the latest decade, the availability of news media from various countries of the globe has increased dramatically as both media production and consumption have been steered towards digital and social platforms. This de-territorialized news ecology has been widely researched in terms of content and distribution, while its broader consequences for news audiences have been less studied. Focusing on the case of Sweden, this article analyses social variations in transnational news consumption including platform selections, motivations, and attitudes connected to this news use. Results show that transnational news consumption is more widespread among people with a background in other countries than Sweden, but all together, more than a quarter of the Swedish population and nearly half of the younger generation are weekly consumers of news from other countries. Hence, transnational news consumption is no longer restricted to a specific elitesegment of society, which has been a common argument in scholarly debates around the globalization of news. Another central finding is that transnational news consumption is rooted in a willingness to understand the outside world through alternative perspectives, rather than in a dissatisfaction with the quality or trustworthiness of the news produced by Swedish outlets.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.