In contemporary hybrid media systems, political actors constantly experiment with new communicative strategies to influence voters during elections. Humour, sarcasm, and irony are examples of persuasive techniques that have increasingly been studied in a variety of contexts, yet there is still limited research examining uses of comedy and news satire genres in relation to strategic political communication during election campaigns. This article contributes to the literature through an exploration of what we define as ‘strategic satire’, focusing on how the two largest political parties in Sweden, The Social Democratic party and the Sweden Democrats, have utilised this strategy on YouTube. We assess strategic news satire across multiple dimensions including generic aspects, topics, and semiotic resources. Results reveal overlapping strategies, but with variations in implementation shaped by differing ideological foundations.

Tiktok är i dag en av världens mest inflytelserika och omstridda medieplattformar. Den når framför allt den eftertraktade yngre målgruppen, medan deras föräldrar och äldre fortfarande är mer avvaktande. Det stora genomslaget för medieplattformen handlar om lekfullhet, humor och ett rappt videospråk. I debatten lyfts däremot ofta säkerhetsproblem, beroendeframkallande tidsfördriv, psykisk ohälsa och möjliga hot mot den demokratiska offentligheten. Trots Tiktoks stora betydelse är den svenska forskningen om plattformen hittills begränsad. Med den här rapporten presenteras därför den första forskningsöversikten på svenska över den internationella forskning som finns. Forskningen synliggör bland annat ungas sårbarhet, etiska utmaningar, risker kopplade till desinformation och behovet av reglering och mediekritisk kompetens. Rapporten är också en introduktion till forskningsprojektet "Tiktokgenerationen: Ungas mediekonsumtion i en tid av digital desinformation".

Conventional political campaigning strategies on social media have been extensively scrutinized by researchers; however, there is a shortage of studies focusing specifically on audiovisual communication by political parties on video-based platforms. Moreover, the adaptation of journalistic genres and formats in political communication has become increasingly prominent, challenging the relationship between media and politics as separate categories in contemporary media systems. This case study aims to address this gap through a detailed description of how mixed methods can be used to analyze political campaign efforts that utilize journalistic genres and formats on YouTube. It demonstrates a combination of manual content analysis with computer-assisted transcription and search techniques, and how these can be combined with qualitative contextual analysis. This resource emphasizes the integration of quantitative, qualitative, and digital approaches to political content in social media, contributing valuable insights to the field of social media analysis. The case study provides students with a theoretically and analytically grounded approach to political communication that aligns with ongoing shifts in hybrid media systems.

’Legacy media’, a term used across disciplines such as journalism studies and political communication, denotes the defining characteristics of traditional or ‘old’ media organizations in contrast to emerging digital media. This entry delineates the foundational concepts of legacy media, encompassing historical perspectives on media technology, diverse financing and organizational structures, audience dynamics, and mediatization processes. While primarily focusing on news media, examples extend to the cultural industries and social media platforms. Through this exploration, legacy media emerges as a conceptual tool, used by scholars to motivate innovation in research and construct new research agendas aligned with the contemporary hybrid media system.

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok’s platform features impact user engagement. Results reveal that party youth organizations had a prominent presence during the campaign, while traditional party actors were less established. TikTok tends to lean toward right-wing content, with right-wing praise being a significant predictor of user engagement. Semiotic resources such as stickers and emoticons but also added music, were widely used platform features, but these features had no or weak negative effects on user engagement. Added speech, particularly when praising right-wing politics, positively influenced user engagement, suggesting the importance of verbal communication on a platform characterized by multimodal experimentation.

The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.

In an increasingly fragmented digital media ecology, political actors constantly experiment with new formats, styles, and collaborations in order to reach specific segments of the citizenry. In this struggle, new and emerging platforms are explored as venues for political campaigning. This chapter explores how two political parties, the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats, utilised the short video format on TikTok during the 2022 election campaign. The chapter presents an analysis of the strategic relationship between influencers and political parties, exploring how TikTok’s short video format impinges on how political messages are designed and communicated. The results highlight the performative aspects of political communication and point to how influencer politics can build on very different logics of authenticity work, using influential users and their followers as a gateway for political campaigning.

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.

This article explores how political parties and individual politicians in Sweden communicate strategically in an online environment where the close relationship between news and journalistic institutions no longer can be taken for granted. We define the adoption and adaption of journalistic conventions in political communication as a particular communication style, conceptualized as “parasitic news”. The article presents an analytical framework that explicates the role of parasitic news across five dimensions: ideological transparency/position, alternativeness, news genres, individual vs. collective media practices, and social media affordances. An analysis of three news projects, representing right-wing populist, liberal/conservative, and left-wing/green ideological positions, reveals that parasitic news is a flexible communication style that blurs the boundaries of politics and media in online spaces. Moreover, parasitic news challenges the relevance of established terms such as alternative, hyper-partisan, and fake news, pointing to the need of a renewed conceptual vocabulary in journalism, media and political communication research.

Political communication has taken new and complex forms within the contemporary hybrid media system. In this article, we examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. We assess the digital television news channel Riks, which during the 2022 national election was operated by the Sweden Democrats party and distributed via YouTube. Deploying a mixed-methods approach, we analysed all videos published by Riks four weeks prior to the election. Results show that Riks blends descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genres, and strategically frames the most important political issues of the election campaign in favour of the party’s policies. Hence, the study contributes to political communication scholarship by emphasising how news has become an integral part of strategic party communication, challenging established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news.

I samtidens hybrida mediesystem antar politisk kommunikation nya och allt mer komplexa uttryck. Den här artikeln undersöker hur politiskt kampanjarbete som bygger på nyhetsformer tidigare utvecklade inom TV-journalistiken, bidrar till en uppluckring av gränser mellan nyhetsjournalistik och politisk kommunikation i digitala informationsmiljöer. Artikeln undersöker den digitala tv-nyhetskanalen Riks, som under riksdagsvalet 2022 drevs av Sverigedemokraterna och publicerades på YouTube. Studien bygger på dataunderstödd metod med kvantitativa och kvalitativa ansatser och analyserar alla videor som publicerades av Riks fyra veckor före valet. Resultaten visar att Riks blandade deskriptiva och tolkande nyhetsgenrer i sin bevakning, men också att innehållet inspirerats av politiska och satiriska nyhetsprogram. Genom dessa genrer gestaltade Riks Sverigedemokraternas viktigaste sakfrågor i valrörelsen på ett sätt som var till förmån för partiets politiska kampanj. Studien bidrar till forskningen om politisk kommunikation genom att betona hur nyhetsproduktion har blivit en integrerad del av strategiskt kampanjarbete. Studien visar också att etablerade forskningsbegrepp som ”alternativa medier” och ”hyperpartiska medier” kan vara problematiska för att beskriva fenomen som Riks, eftersom de saknar en tydlig strategisk dimension.