Gaye Tuchman’s Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality is a book that has made its mark on media and journalism studies alike. It combines extensive ethnographic work in diverse news media settings with sociological, phenomenological and social constructionist theorization. While the news world and newswork have changed significantly since Tuchman’s studies were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the ideas on news live on, and so do the ways in which Tuchman scrutinizes and theorizes work as well as ideas. Tuchman views newswork as a theoretical activity, which, like research, utilizes categorization. She asks: “How does the media construct reality?”, and answers using concepts such as frame, facticity, news net, time, space, tradition, and ideology. Tuchman ultimately shows that we need to study work in order to understand ideas, and vice versa, and elaborates on a theory of knowledge that reaches far beyond news.

I detta kapitel går vi igenom forskning på kulturjournalistikens område; undersökningar av kulturjournalistiken i stort såväl som studier av enskilda delområden som recensioner och omvärldsbevakning. Vi börjar med att ge några exempel på kulturens och kulturjournalistikens centrala roll i den svenska samhällsdebatten och gör sedan en genomgång av teoribildningar på forskningsområdet, med särskilt fokus på fältteori, teorier om (de)professionalisering, offentlighetsteori/demokratisk teori samt globaliseringsteori. Därpå följer en redogörelse för den internationella forskningen, med fokus på Europa och de övriga nordiska länderna där flest studier genomförts. Dessa sammanfattas i termer av estetik och geografi, samt populärkultur och kommersialisering. Vi landar sedan i en diskussion av forskningen om svensk kulturjournalistik och går där igenom studier av recensioner i pressen; journalistisk praktik, tolkningsgemenskaper och digitalisering; samt hur den svenska kulturjournalistikens präglas av samhällsfokus och omvärldsrelationer. Majoriteten av studierna är koncentrerade kring tidningsjournalistik. Med utgångspunkt i detta och med hänsyn till senare tids allmänna utveckling inom journalistiken belyser vi slutligen behovet av forskning som tar avstamp i multimediala sammanhang. Vi konstaterar också att studier av kulturjournalistik lämnat särskilda bidrag till teoriutveckling, samt att de är avgörande för förståelsen av journalistikens utveckling i stort och radar upp några områden där detta blivit särskilt tydligt, exemplevis genom den ökade betydelsen av subjektiva, tolkande och känslosamma inslag i journalistiken.

Scholarly discussions around the significance of journalism for democracy and the public sphere have traditionally centered on news and political journalism. Consequently, there is a dearth of studies on the role of politics in other journalistic subfields. This paper addresses this research gap by examining the democratic contribution of cultural journalism in Sweden. Drawing on public sphere theory and agonistic democracy theory and utilizing data from a nationwide Swedish survey (N = 1804), social variations in consumption are analyzed, including the types of content that motivate people to consume cultural journalism. Results indicate that age, education, and political preferences are important correlates in relation to high consumption of cultural journalism. Furthermore, the findings indicate that societal debate is a more significant driver of cultural journalism consumption than traditional aesthetic coverage. This underscores the distinctive democratic role of cultural journalism within the media landscape and its particular contribution to the diversity of journalistic content.

Hur ser världen ut när den betraktas genom ett kulturellt filter? Hur bidrar kulturjournalistiken till förståelsen av brännande samtidshändelser och samhällsfrågor? Är kulturjournalisternas oro för kritikens överlevnad i det digitala medielandskapet befogad? 

I denna bok undersöker tre medieforskare kulturjournalistikens utveckling sedan 1980-talet med särskilt fokus på omvärldsbilder och politiska dimensioner. Författarna kartlägger innehåll i tidningar, radio och tv och intervjuar kulturjournalister. De diskuterar de sociala mediernas betydelse och belyser svenskarnas intresse för kulturjournalistik. 

Det visar sig att kulturjournalistiken har ett unikt anslag jämfört med traditionell nyhetsjournalistik och politisk opinionsbildning. Den rör sig gärna bortom nationalstatliga förståelseramar och är debattdrivande på ett särpräglat sätt. Laddade kulturdebatter om #metoo, terrorism och identitetspolitik breder ut sig och lockar till klick. Samtidigt har recensionsgenren fortfarande en given roll i utbudet, även om den befinner sig i klicklandskapets utkanter. 

Boken ger en unik inblick i en sällan belyst del av det svenska medielandskapet, och tillför ny kunskap om kulturjournalistikens särskilda stildrag samt de roller den spelar i samhället och demokratin. 

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.

This chapter makes the argument that issues related to the cultural public sphere should be considered part of the political communication circuit. Cultural journalism in the Nordic context is a central case in point. On the side of arts, popular culture, and lifestyle, Nordic cultural journalism at times includes reporting and debate about sociocultural and politically saturated issues such as climate change, migration, terrorism, freedom of speech, identity politics, and gender inequalities. The chapter highlights three theoretical approaches, intersecting with the field of political communication, which have been of particular importance in Nordic scholarship about cultural journalism: public sphere theory, the politics of recognition, and the sociology of (cultural) journalism. The media coverage and debates about #metoo in Danish and Swedish cultural journalism in late 2017 serve to illustrate the arguments about the political in cultural journalism and reveals its quantitative salience as well as its qualitative specificities.

AbstractRecent years have seen another peak in global media attention to climate change. Drivenby increasingly dire news about extreme weather, growing demands of systemic adaptionand a new wave political activism, the current situation has increasingly been framed as aclimate crisis. This introductory essay maps these recent developments and elaborates theconceptual potentials and limitations of the “crisis” frame. It also briefly reviews the stateof the art of media research and situates the contributions of the issue into this landscape.

Theme VIII. Climate Justice Communication:

This theme consists of two chapters, one largely theoretical piece, drawing on previous studies to suggest future directions for research, and one applied case study. Both chapters discuss the situations of Indigenous peoples and illuminate challenges of communicating climate justice across diverse communicational and geographical contexts. Roosvall and Tegelberg (Chapter 22) detail how attention to economic, cultural, and political justice must be combined with attention to geographical scope, suggesting that future research consider how geographical scales are combined or disconnected in climate change reporting for diverse types of media. In Chapter 23, Yagodin applies a pluralistic climate justice approach, which includes justice for nature, and zooms in on Russian climate change reporting. He examines how calls for climate justice were largely excluded from journalistic, but not NGO, framings of the 2016 anthrax outbreak on the Yamal peninsula. Together, these contributions highlight possibilities and challenges for justly communicating about climate justice.

Climate-induced migration is a global challenge that affects specific local communities unevenly. This chapter addresses it as an issue of climate justice via three cases concerning U.S. islands: Sarichef Island in Alaska, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, and Puerto Rico. The cases were selected for their similarities and differences concerning degrees of poverty, indigenous populations and rights, and political representation. These aspects correspond to three dimensions of injustice: economic, cultural and political. Our aim is to explore how climate migration is understood in local and transnational media and if and how issues of justice appear in selected news coverage.

To this purpose, we apply multimodal critical discourse analysis on a small sample of newspaper articles for each case. Findings indicate that transnational journalism tends to attend to economic injustice and scalar transcendence (local-global scales), while local journalism uniquely includes connections between two or more justice dimensions, which is necessary for the amendment of injustice, and scalar integration, where the needs of people are not motivated by what the rest of the world can learn, but viewed as crucial in themselves. There are also differences between the cases, indicating that acceptance for climate migration as a term varies across communities.

This chapter draws upon existing research on media and climate justice to outline an agenda for future research on climate justice communication. By focusing on the challenges faced particularly by Indigenous and other frontline communities around the world, we demonstrate that this agenda must pay close heed to geographical scales and how these are (dis)connected in climate change reporting. Drawing on Fraser (2014), we outline how diverse matters of justice (economic, cultural, political) interact as conditions for climate justice. By detailing key areas, concepts and analytical distinctions, we offer a way forward in terms of communicating climate justice as well as for researching climate change communication through a lens of justice theory and analysis. The chapter ultimately illuminates how the intersection between matters of justice, geographical scales and diverse media (local, national, transnational) make communicating demands for climate justice such a challenging task; yet one filled with opportunities.