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 article investigates the way Swedish cultural journalists from press, radio and television perceive the core and boundaries of their sub-field at a time when digitalisation and “journalistification” blur them even more. It draws on 27 in-depth interviews with cultural journalists that have worked in the field since the 1980s. What is defined as cultural journalism has expanded since the inclusion of popular culture in its mandate in the early 1990s. Despite this, cultural journalists at different media share similar understandings of their remit, even if self-identification with current practices varies somewhat by generation. The study shows how cultural journalists defend and negotiate the boundaries towards debate and opinion, and news and entertainment journalism. Cultural journalists experience pressure by management to be relevant, newsworthy and “clickable”. Especially press respondents felt that cultural debates have become increasingly indistinguishable from societal debates, due to their visibility in the digital flow. How cultural journalists negotiate boundaries with entertainment and news desks varies somewhat depending on the media organisation. Boundary challenges appear through new genres related to liveness, personality-orientation and societal debate, all of which may conflict with the central task of cultural journalism—to provide in-depth reflection and expertise-based analysis.

Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV series Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are as follows: (1) cultural journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects internal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; (2) Nordic cultural journalists position themselves positively toward the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; (3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes toward popular culture phenomena such as TV series.

Cultural and entertainment journalism deals with aesthetic experiences, advice on cultural consumption, as well as reflection and debate on ethical and moral humanistic issues. Does this sub-field of journalism systematically represent immigrants and integration differently than the other news and commentary articles? Comparing immigration discourse in a representative sample of six Scandinavian newspapers between 1970 and 2016 using content analysis we find that cultural journalism, while clearly reverbing with the dominant national issues at the time, did provide alternative perspectives. It not only brought up themes like racism, multiculturalism, national identity and religion more often, but was also more positive, more gender-balanced and more often gave a voice to immigrants than other news did. A closer qualitative reading further suggests a typology of ten main story-types, varying relatively little over time and across national borders. Cultural journalism in this case illustrates how the cultural public sphere can positively contribute to the debate of complicated issues in the public sphere by offering resources for identification, empathy and arguments for specific points of view.

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.

Cultural journalism is a subfield of journalism that encompasses what is known as arts journalism. While arts journalism is characterized by reviews, critique, news, and essays about the arts and popular culture, cultural journalism has a broader take on culture, including lifestyle issues, societal debate, and reflective ethical discussion by cultural personas or expressed in a literary style. Both arts and cultural journalists see their work as “journalism with a difference,” evoking different perspectives and worldviews from those dominating mainstream news reporting. At the same time, cultural journalism shares with journalism issues like boundary work, genre blurring, digitalization, globalization, professionalization, and “the crisis of journalism.” There are three main ways cultural journalism has been studied: one research strand defines cultural journalism as material produced by the cultural desks or material that is explicitly labelled cultural journalism; another defines it as journalism about culture, regardless of how it is labelled or produced; and a third strand includes only arts journalism, examining journalistic content on the fine arts and popular culture. Studies from all of these approaches are included in this article due to the effort to include a wide variety of countries at different time periods and an effort to track joint defining features and developments in cultural journalism. The emphasis is on the Nordic context, where the term “cultural journalism” is well established and where research is relatively comprehensive. The research is divided into three themes: the cultural public sphere and the contribution to democracy; cultural journalism’s professionalism and the challenges of digitalization; and transnational and global aspects of cultural journalism, including tendencies such as cultural homogenization and hybridization.

International research on cultural journalism as a subfield has been complicated by its varying designations (arts journalism, feuilleton, journalism about culture, entertainment), and its numerous aesthetic forms, disciplines, or types of culture, all of which are changing over time. Despite these issues, research points in the same direction: the amount of cultural journalism is increasing, and the boundaries against other types of journalism are becoming more porous. There is also a decline in editorial autonomy. In common with journalism, there is an increase in generalists working with culture and greater central managerial control in new multiplatform media organizations. The research points to an increase in a more transnationally oriented cultural journalism, mainly through a larger share of cultural news and popular culture—while its core, review and critique, has changed in character, or arguably lost ground. The increasing “newsification” of cultural journalism should prompt future research on whether the “watchdog” role vis-à-vis the cultural industries is growing. New forms of art and culture are beginning to get coverage, but also, in some cases, the intermixing of “lifestyle” with cultural journalism. The commercialization and celebrity aspects of this are clear, but new digital platforms have also enabled new voices and different formats of cultural journalism and a wider dissemination and intensity in cultural debates, all of which emphasize its democratic potential. New research on this subject appears to focus on the longitudinal changes in cultural journalism, the implications of digitalization and globalization, and cultural journalism in broadcasting.

This chapter traces the historical development of Swedish cultural journalism as a distinctive contributor to societal debate and aesthetic discourse in the mainstream media. How did Swedish cultural journalism come to have this dual focus on politics and artistic expression, and where does it stand in relation to today’s digital media landscape? The chapter deals with the hybrity of this sub-field of journalism, the meta-debates about its professionalisation and commercialisation, key cultural editors that staked out a space for cultural journalism in their newspapers and how the public service media gradually took on their own cultural journalistic roles in relation to the press.