This article engages with current discussions about public emotions by examining journalists' perceptions of the value of emotional expression in broadcast news. First, the study provides insight into how journalists assess the place and role of emotion in news reporting and the perceived emotionalizing of news. Second, it examines how the journalists' discourse about emotion is linked to their ideas of 'good journalism', as well as to their professional self-image. The data consist of in-depth interviews with television journalists working for both public service and commercial news programmes in Finland and in the Netherlands.

FAKE NEWS: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict

Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images 2 Re-imagining crisis reporting

This study examines how citizens made use of online platforms to direct diverging critiques and demands at the Finnish Immigration Service during what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in Europe. Focusing on peak periods of debate, identified using big data, we closely observe how public scrutiny of the immigration service occurred in the interactions between online users, the news media and the agency itself. Our analysis indicates that networked publics can be regarded as influential drivers of accountability for government agencies, which often feel obligated to justify their actions to these publics. However, the operation of networked publics as accountability agents remains heavily dependent on the broader public debate, which is still largely shaped by news media organisations, political elites and the officials themselves.

On the night of 19 March 2004, in Konginkangas, Central Finland, a bus carrying passengers on a skiing vacation from Helsinki to Lapland crashed into a tractor-trailer loaded with paper rolls on an icy highway. The heavy rolls ejected into the bus immediately killed most of the passengers, mainly teenagers and young adults. With 23 dead, the Konginkangas bus accident represented the worst traffic accident in Finnish history. The death of young people is not expected in a modern society and perhaps because of that the expressions of public grief and ritualizing were unprecedented: people laid flowers and lighted candles at the snowy road site, placed virtual condolences and attended memorial services. A sense of national tragedy was heightened by intense media coverage that focused on mourning rituals and the youngest of the victims.Recently, a discussion within media research on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and mass media has intensified (e.g.

This is pre-print version of an article whose final and definitive version has been published in Global Media and Communication.

This paper examines how the video-sharing platform YouTube was utilized by networks of anti-immigration activists that began emerging in Finland during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. By combining network analysis with qualitative analysis, we identified three central strategies of video activism: movement building through documentation, discursive controversy generation, and personal branding practices. These strategies are firmly supported by the affordances of YouTube and by the way in which the platform enables the building of varying scales of media presence. Consequently, our findings highlight the increasingly common practice of microcelebrity branding in online political communication. This notion demonstrates the affinities between fragmented and contingently mobilized anti-immigration movements and the personalizing and performance-oriented logics of social media presence, in particular when explored from a post-movement perspective. In the algorithmic environment of YouTube, microcelebrity is a political and a platform-specific genre that occupies the post-movement political space by generating sustainable algorithmic visibility.

In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-oriented themes on refugee issues in social media, as well as illuminates the distinct role of social media platforms in shaping debates through user practices of hyperlink sharing and networked framing. Together these findings suggest that the hybrid media environment provides a possible arena for polarization of the refugee debate that could also be used for political ends.