This article presents a global-comparative study of journalists reporting about art and culture, that is, cultural journalists. In the literature, this particular group is said to be different from other types of journalists, because their professional work is guided more by an aesthetic logic than a news logic. Until now, however, this difference has mainly been studied in national contexts. Applying a global-comparative perspective by using data from The Worlds of Journalism Study, this article shows that cultural journalists around the globe do in fact differ systematically from other types of journalists in their social and professional characteristics, and also in terms of perceptions of influences on daily work and professional role perceptions. Even though media systemic contexts play a role, cultural journalists do have distinct characteristics worldwide. This is the first study to apply such a global-comparative perspective to the role perceptions of this particular group of journalists.

No abstract

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term "cultural journalism and cultural critique." In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to frame the study of cultural journalism and cultural critique more generally and the eight articles of this special issue more specifically: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of "journalism" and "critique"; (2) the dialectic of globalisation's cultural homo-genisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique. KEYWORDS cultural critics; cultural critique; cultural journalism; digital journalism; digital media; news production Introduction: Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique as Emerging Research Areas Politics, art, and culture have since the introduction of newspapers in Western societies been covered sideby-side by various and more or less critical writers, of which journalists were just one variety. However, journalism research has a long tradition of prioritising political journalism and news media, primarily as a political public sphere. Likewise, political journalism increasingly came to set the agenda in the newsrooms and in journalism education during the twentieth century. This political leaning in both research and practice is closely linked to the professional and normative ideal or ideology of Western journalism, an ideal that stipulates an autonomous, objective, and versatile press, performing the role of society's watchdog and addressing urgent events and issues of societal importance as a constituent element of democracy (e.g., Curran 2011; Deuze 2005). Thus in many ways the political bias is fully justified. One consequence, however, has been the neglect by scholars of the news media's coverage of "softer" issues such as art, culture, lifestyle, "life politics" (Giddens 1992), and the cultural public spherewhat we, in this special issue, term "cultural journalism." In much the same way, journalists covering these issues have consistently had to defend their work to their peers and the public (see Harries and Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; Hovden and Knapskog 2015). This scholarly inattention as well as the professional need for justification are striking in light of the fact that these topics have become increasingly important parts of news production during the twentieth century and are today covered intensively (e.g., Janssen, Kuipers, and Verboord 2008; Kristensen and From 2011). When occasionally addressed by scholars, these topics have typically been analysed in relation to political journalism. Political journalism has been viewed as the proper kind of journalism, "the real journalism" (Deuze 2005, 444), ...

Taking a point of departure in theories about cultural (inter)

This article is an introduction to “cultural journalism,” a specialised type of professional journalism that covers and debates the broad field of arts and culture. The article points to some of the research traditions that have engaged with the news media's coverage of arts and culture and inspired contemporary cultural journalism research, among them cultural sociology and the sociology of journalism. Furthermore, the article outlines the institutional roles and epistemology of cultural journalism, which in several respects differ from dominating normative conceptions of Western journalism. At the same time, the article shows that contemporary journalism shares many similarities with the approaches found in culural journalism, such as interpretation, emotionality, and subjectivity. Finally, the article points to important future paths for cultural journalism research, including comparative perspectives and the political dimensions and potentialities of cultural journalism.