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), ...
This article introduces a theoretical typology of four rival yet converging ideal types of cultural critics in contemporary media culture and in cultural journalism, more specifically, encapsulated by the term the heterogeneous cultural critic and characterized by different kinds of authority and expertise: (1) the intellectual cultural critic, who is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition, bohemia and/or academia, or institutionalized cultural capital; (2) the professional cultural journalist, who is first and foremost embedded in a media professional logic; (3) the media-made arbiter of taste, whose authority is closely linked to practical experience with cultural production and repeated charismatic media performances; and (4) the everyday amateur expert, who offers subjective opinions and represents experience-based cultural taste. The aim is to provide an analytical minimum model for future empirical studies by outlining the contours of the multiple, objective and subjective, professional and non-professional cultural "authorities" of contemporary media culture. KEYWORDS celebrity capital; charismatic authority; cultural criticism in the media; cultural journalism; heterogeneous cultural critics; media capital; media intellectuals
RETHINKING CONSTRUCTIVE JOURNALISM BY MEANS OF SERVICE JOURNALISM Unni From and Nete Nørgaard Kristensen This article argues that constructive journalism scholarship should look to service journalism and its subfields, cultural journalism and lifestyle journalism, to understand the key characteristics of this newer type of journalism. Though constructive journalism is typically associated with the reporting of political and social issues, it is also seen to challenge the traditional ways of writing about such hard news topics due to its positive and solutionoriented approach. In this respect, constructive journalism seems to reuse some of the approaches known from service journalism, especially in terms of audience address and an expanded social role for journalists. However, service journalism emerged in the increasingly commercialized and globalized media landscape of the post-World War II period, whereas constructive journalism has emerged in the digital media landscape of the 2010s. These historical contexts provide particular circumstances for both types of journalism. KEYWORDS Constructive journalism; cultural journalism; hard news; lifestyle journalism; service journalism; soft news This article provides a different framework for understanding constructive journalism. It makes the case that this type of journalism, in many ways, resembles service journalism (Eide 1992; Eide and
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