This paper considers the performativity of shaming in investigative TV-journalism. Itargues that the construction of shame is not only a constituent element in investigative TVjournalismbut also an important factor in pursuing some of its main objectives: establishingmorals, exercising social control, reinforcing journalistic identity and ideology, and competingfor attention in a diversified media theatre where drama, entertainment and emotionalthrills are the hard currency. An empirical study of the Swedish TV programme Uppdraggranskning, is used to inductively propose three categories of shaming and to give someexamples of the ways in which shaming is performed. The core of the paper is a theorydriven analysis in which the performativity of shaming in investigative TV-journalism isanalysed in the light of some converging media and societal trends.

This article undertakes a critical discourse analysis of Swedish quality newspaper editorials and their evolving framing of immigration since the 2015 peak of the recent European “refugee crisis”. Positioned within the ongoing discursive shifts in the Swedish public sphere and the growth of discursive uncivility in its mainstream areas, the analysis highlights how xenophobic and racist discourses once propagated by the far and radical right gradually penetrate into the studied broadsheet newspapers. We argue that the examined editorials carry the tendency to normalise once radical perceptions of immigration. This takes place by incorporating various discursive strategies embedded in wider argumentative frames – or topoi – of demographic consequences, Islam and Islamisation, threat, and integration. All of these enable constructing claims against immigration now apparently prevalent in the examined strands of the Swedish “quality” press.

In this article, I explore the reception of American "quality" serial television in Sweden from 1999 to the mid-2010s. My analysis includes how cultural critics and journalists writing for Sweden’s leading newspapers conceptualised American serial television as a "quality TV" and as legitimate "art", and it charts the ways in which these discourses relate to the reconfiguration of Swedish television from public service monopoly to niche-oriented multichannel system. The analysis uncovers a process of cultural consecration that was based on comparisons with already consecrated art forms, applications of authorship discourses that promote certain individuals as genius television auteurs, and deployment of critical protocols borrowed from literary criticism – all in service of pre-established cultural hierarchy and "good taste". This article also highlights the ubiquity of American quality serial television across the Swedish television landscape, which suggests that such programmes represent both a niche product and a mass phenomenon with extensive reach and multidimensional appeal.

This study explores the aims of the Nobel Banquet broadcast, produced by the Swedish public service company SVT and the Nobel Foundation. The study suggests that the programme can be viewed as a co-construction of science and media, and that the Nobel Foundation has three primary purposes: 1) to teach the audience about science; 2) to honour the laureates; and 3) to maintain and increase the status of the Nobel prize. SVT, for their part, has two main purposes: 1) to teach their audience about science, and 2) to entertain. The aims of the Nobel Foundation and SVT may seem disparate, but they are interrelated. At the same time, the subtleties between the entities create a tension that develops through mutual negotiations. The study ends with a discussion of two unexpected findings: 1) the shared, yet essentially differently-grounded aims of both parties to inform about science, and 2) the fact that their scientific content has increased in both absolute and relative terms over the years, a finding that questions notions of a continuous mediatisation of social institutions.

The purpose of this article is to shed light on a new phenomenon in the media landscape, namely public organisations taking on the role of news producers. The analysis focuses on the digital news site VGRfokus, which is run by the Swedish county council Region Västra Götaland (VGR). The articulated goal of VGRfocus is to fill a perceived news gap in the county. Using previous literature on hyperlocal media as a lens for the analysis, we discuss how a regional news outlet produced by a public organisation can be characterised and understood. Based on our case study, we show that, while VGRfokus partly resembles other newcomers, it also has features that make it a very special news producer. This distinctiveness relates in particular to the fact that VGRfokus is part of a large, public organisation and holds ambitions to promote the work of the county council and represent its geographical area. This places issues concerning trustworthiness and credibility at the centre of the discussion and raises questions about democratic implications.

The article focuses on "The Intimization of Journalism," a program related to journalism and media research that tries to redefine the limits of private life as related to the public sphere. The program analyzes feminism and gender issues. It explores the reasons why at particular time, an issue related to intimate sphere was covered or ignored. The issue of tabloidization is analyzed from different perspectives. Journalism is not restricted to particular class of rich, poor, educated or powerful. The program is used to describe different aspects of medial transition of the twentieth century without debating it's outcomes. In this context, the article discusses several core issues related to the transformation of public sphere namely medialized public intimacy, journalistic interview, illustrations and photographs. It looks upon the media as analysis material rather then a source. It further analysis changes in media presentations in different period of times. It is significantly indebted to the feminist and gender theory.

This article examines Storylab, a collaborative learning project between the journalism programme at Stockholm University and the engineering programme in media technology at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, designed to combine journalistic storytelling with pervasive media technology. The aim of the study is to identify and reflect on the challenges associated with the approach. The methods used are a survey and semi-structured interviews with the students. The analyses draw on research concerning the current main challenges for the news industry and journalism educators. The results show that Storylab was highly appreciated, and provided students with useful skills for their professional lives. However, not all groups worked well together, and some students wished that the collaboration had been more extensive. Differences in motivations and priorities were mentioned as restraining factors. Therefore, it is argued that for a sustainable media landscape, journalists and engineers must collaborate, and that this cooperation can be brought about during professional training.

This Special Issue of Nordicom Review discusses interactive practices of articulating and communicating uncivility in the context of recent wider anti- and post-democratic change. We consider that change as a cross-national phenomenon that has been taking place in the Nordic countries, Europe, and indeed elsewhere since the late 1990s and early 2000s, and one that has significantly accelerated with the global rise of the “anxious politics” (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015) of right-wing populism and the far-right (Moffitt, 2016; Mudde, 2019) in recent decades. While our collection joins an ongoing and growing body of research on both un- and incivility – which we describe and to some extent disentangle conceptually in detail below – it carries a few pronounced aims which characterise its contribution to the wider research on mediated and political communication in the context of a crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of nativism and far-right populism.

Despite the fragmentation of audience behaviour and the pluralization of platforms within the media cultures of the digital age, cultural memory practices retain an important feature: They echo a basic existential quest for communitas. The present article compares two seemingly incomparable regimes of memory of our time: the anniversaries of 9.11 on Swedish television and web communities of commemoration of lost loved ones. It suggests through these contrasting examples that existential themes are pursued in the face of three challenges: the temporality of instantaneity, the all-pervasive networked individualism that makes memory into a matter of elective affinities, and the technological capacities that subject memory to endless revision. The article explores the existential dimension of these memory practices in line with research within the culturalist emphasis on the study of media and religion. This debate recognizes the need for a broader understanding of the mediated qualities of religion and the religious qualities of the media. The article argues that both televisual anniversaries of trauma that invite audiences to an annual return, and our new multiple and fragmented media memories compel us to conceive of our hyper-contingent, late-modern digital age as a quest for meaning, transcendence and cohesion – for what Victor Turner (1969) called existential communitas. 

Research on news organizations’ handling of ‘what-a-story’s proposes that journalists findroutines for handling these events based on their previous experiences of similar situations.Still, conceptual discussions on how to define extraordinary events or ’what-a-story’s havethus far attracted limited interest. In response, the present article proposes a definition of‘what-a-story’s in order to provide an understanding of what events become a part of newsorganizations’ historical case banks. Accordingly, the aim of the article is to present a definitionof crisis news events from an organizational perspective, which can help distinguishcritical news events of importance to news organizations’ learning and preparedness. Thearticle argues that crisis news are to be understood as surprise events that challenge keyorganizational values and demand a swift response. Based on interviews with Swedishbroadcasting media managers, the article illustrates how the September 11th terror attackscan be defined as a crisis event.

Mediated descriptions of reality are tremendously important to the way the public - and policymakers - perceive the police. The present article analyses how leading news outlets reported and commented on complaints against the Norwegian police during the period 2005-2008. The study is based on content analyses of press and television coverage, with special emphasis on a publicly debated police action in which a student of African origins lost his life. In most cases, news coverage of the police and the investigators of the police is event-driven, and the picture of the police seldom points to institutional or organizational problems. The story is too often one about individual wrongdoings alone. Unfortunately, such media pictures matter and influence policy decisions, especially when they become the point of departure for political debate

Television news narratives are sites where national and transnational identities are cultivatedand mobilised. The question is not whether Swedish, Danish or British news stories about Europe are domesticated to fit national news bulletins, but how events are domesticated and how ‘we’ are made European by the programmes’ producers. The analysis of all European stories between 15-21 November 1999 in three national public servicenews bulletins indicate that viewers are offered different images of Europe during this week, and that journalists play active roles in constructing ‘themes’ which link together different types of news stories into narratives about ‘us’ and ‘them’. From these there emerged a Swedish ‘moralising global villager’, slightly superior but willing to adapt to changing international realities, an anxious and conscientious Danish ‘we’, trying to doits share despite its self-imposed limitations on EU cooperation, and an engaged humanitarian British ‘we’, who is global in scope but prefers to keep a distance from time consuming Euro-squabbles.

Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive, focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to cultural elites. The cultural filter put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing journalistification of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.

In their efforts to find others who share their experiential reality and existential struggle, many involuntarily childless women turn to Instagram to engage and participate in the practice of trying-to-conceive (TTC) communication. Through the conceptual lens of digital existence, where the digital and online are regarded as constitutive of existential transition, we draw on ten interviews and an online ethnography to explore some of the struggles that involuntarily childless women experience with and through technology. We find that TTC communication can be constitutive of coming to terms with the status of involuntary childlessness. In particular, this study illustrates that TTC communication, for involuntarily childless women, is both a site of struggle and a safe space as they transition to nonmotherhood in an existential terrain where they share an intimate journey.

There is a certain tendency in the contemporaryhistoriography of early film studies to construe mo-dernity as a model for the textual analysis of spe-cific, isolated moments in film history. Furthermore,film history – and other media histories – is usuallystudied and written within the academic boundariesof different departments. We are given the historyof media according to media and communications,film studies, art history, literature and so on. Veryseldom are we offered a perspective founded on aninterdisciplinary or comparative approach.Therefore, I will both criticise some trends inearly film historiography and argue in favour of theimportance – and necessity – of employing a histo-rico-dialectical and comparative analysis. I supportmy argument and discussion by comparing theparadigmatic interpretations of “modernity vs.early film” and the Finnish discourses on early filmin the 1920s and the early novel in the 1850s.

Proactive self-tracking is a proliferating digital media practice that involves gathering data about the body and the self outside a clinical healthcare setting. Various studies have noted that self-tracking technologies affect people's everyday modes of thought and action and stick to their lifeworlds because these technologies seek to promote improved modes of behaviour. We investigate how the specific devices and interfaces involved in self-tracking attract and prescribe rhythmicity into everyday lives and elaborate on how human bodies and technical systems of self-tracking interact rhythmically. We draw from new materialist ontology, combining it with Henri Lefebvre's method of rhythmanalysis and his notion of dressage. We employ a collaborative autoethnographical approach and engage with both of our personal fieldwork experiences in living with self-tracking devices. We argue that rhythmicity and dressage are fruitful analytical tools to use in understanding human-technology attachments as well as a variety of everyday struggles inherent in self-tracking practices.

The present article discusses intimate conversations about suicide that are pursued on the Internet. Computer-mediated communication has made it possible for participants to remain anonymous and, simultaneously, enter into a public space to share personal thoughts about a stigmatized and taboo subject. This has also created new and unique opportunities to study a type of communication that was previously very difficult to access. Most of the participants on the studied forum are teenagers or young adults who communicate based on a need to recognize themselves in others, and to receive acknowledgement for their thoughts, feelings and experiences, thereby gaining acceptance and understanding. However, there are also destructive elements in the form of an exchange of suicide methods and participants exhorting each other to go ahead with their suicide plans. Moreover, participants are able to practise suicide behaviour in a mediated, conversational form, thereby making the act seem less fearful. The participants are furthermore involved in constructing and re-constructing a counter-discourse in which established society’s perceptions and values concerning suicide are questioned, as expressed in a critique against public institutions, mainly psychiatry.