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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2010
Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2010
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2010
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Dialogical ambiguities: journalism, professionalism and flattery
By Martin EideJournalism, as a soft profession, is facing severe challenges these days, and a need arises for professional maintenance work. Efforts to renegotiate the social contract of journalism reflect an expanding need for justification of journalism as a social institution. This position paper asks what challenges are facing journalistic expertise. What kind of professional competences are at stake? And how does the drawing of boundaries and cooperation take place when journalists confront digital competitors and/or partners? The article addresses the professional interest in audience participation and teamwork in current journalism, and discusses the problem of a flattering approach towards the audience.
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The views of the news: The role of political newspapers in a changing media landscape
More LessOur understanding of newspapers, for obvious reasons, is to a large degree based on the fact that they report on the news. However, there are limits to the informational news paradigm if we are to understand the political and social role of newspapers. Newspapers are also written, published and read because they carry political viewpoints and arguments and, in a wider sense, interpretations of the social and cultural world. As such, individual newspapers and their respective readerships constitute circuits of shared beliefs and opinion formation. According to professional journalistic norms, news and views must be separated, but in actual practice the borderline may not always be clear, and in the minds of some readers it may not even be desirable. Due to a changing media system in Denmark, the newspaper market has become differentiated and two different types of newspapers have emerged: a political press, with mixed commercial and publicist objectives, and a non-political press, with a clear commercial objective. Empirically, the analysis and discussion are based on a quantitative content analysis of Danish national dailies and surveys of newspaper readers.
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From party agitators to independent pundits The changed historical roles of newspaper and television journalists in Norwegian election campaigns
More LessThe focus of this article is the changing roles of the pundits of the press during national election campaigns and the consequences for the political role of television news and newspapers. Three election campaigns 1965, 1989 and 2009 are compared, mainly through content analyses. In 1965 most political commentators in the national and regional newspapers were leading party members, the members of the press lobby even meeting regularly in the party's groups in Stortinget (the Norwegian parliament). Their role as interpreters and agitators was on behalf of their party and its ideology. In 1989 the party press was nearly abolished and the National Broadcasting Company had for long exercised full control over their election debates. The questioning programmes had been developed into tough interrogations, nicknamed as grilling of the politicians. Most of the political commentators of the press were now formally independent, however often with strong political and ideological roots in the old party system. During the national election campaign in 2009 the political commentators had a new and far more visible role than in the public debate, compared with 1965 and 1989. The leading commentators are published more prominently than before, and are used as trademark for their own newspapers. The pundit elite has also been elevated to the role of chief experts on the political horse race in television news and debates.
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The historical transformation of cultural journalism
More LessThis article is based on the first content analysis of the coverage of culture, lifestyle and consumption or journalism on culture in the Danish printed press during the twentieth century. It argues that cultural journalism has expanded and developed its focus, interpretation and presentation of culture concurrently with a changing culture and consumer industry and especially as part of, and a result of, an increasingly competitive and professionalized media landscape. This should be seen in the light of a culturalized and mediatized society: the media (in this case the newspapers analysed and their coverage of journalism on culture) have developed from cultural institutions with a primary focus on the common public interest, towards media institutions whose primary focus is commercial and media-professional. More specifically, contemporary cultural journalism in a continuum between culture, lifestyle and consumption is of considerable value and importance to the newspapers as media institutions. The individual newspapers, however, manage the form and content of their coverage of these subjects quite differently, according to their existing editorial profiles. Thus, cultural journalism is a subject of both shared editorial priority and differentiation.
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Constructing the audience: a study of segmentation in the Danish press
By Ida WilligNo more than twenty years ago, the doors between the newsrooms and the marketing departments of Danish newspapers were tightly shut. Today, all major Danish newspapers work with reader profiles using marketing data to create journalistic concepts. This article identifies two dominant reader constructions in policy papers of Danish newspapers: the reader-as-citizen, which can be traced back to the late 1940s, and the reader-as-consumer, visible in the historically new reader profiles, where we also find a third reader construction, the reader-as-commodity. The development indicates a transformation from an Omnibus press system with a publicist logic of practice to a Segment press system with a commercial logic of practice.
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Towards a typology of cross-media news consumption: a qualitativequantitative synthesis
Authors: Kim Christian Schrder and Christian KobbernagelThe article presents the first version of a methodologically innovative typology of people's use and experience of news, across different media platforms. Theoretically, the article is based on the modernized version of Jrgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere, which is sometimes labelled theory of cultural citizenship, or civic agency. We observe the citizen-consumers' selection from the available news media through the theoretical lens of perceived worthwhileness, which consists of seven dimensions that aggregate to condition an individual's portfolio of news media in everyday life. The empirical investigation uses an integrated qualitative-quantitative method, resulting in a typology of cross-media news consumption with seven user types, which is compared with the Pew 2008 study of news consumption in the United States.
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The contribution of free dailies and news on the web: implications of media structural changes for the Swedish newspaper readership market
Authors: Annika Bergstrm and Ingela WadbringThe decline in reading the morning papers has been considered a problem in modern countries in recent decades. In particular, it is young people who are abandoning the paid morning paper. During the same period, new forms of newspapers such as free dailies and online news have developed. The purpose of this article, in which we take different types of newspapers into consideration, is to analyse the development of readership among Swedes in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The data analysed have been collected through postal surveys of 6000 people each year since 2000. When we add new forms of newspapers to the traditional ones, the readership level is very stable even among young people. Readership is still decreasing, but not to the same extent as when only traditional papers are measured. It can be difficult to determine, however, what should be considered a newspaper in the twenty-first century. Evening tabloids online are not the same with regard to content and function as local morning papers.
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The reading of cultural and lifestyle journalism
By Unni FromBased on analyses of 25 qualitative individual interviews with readers from different demographic backgrounds, this article investigates how readers experience and use journalism on culture in both online and print press. I argue that the use of journalism on culture is constituted within different reading positions. These reading positions are characterized not only as objectively and ideologically determined categories (Hall 1973), but also as subjectively constituted (Schrder 2000) ways for audiences to negotiate personal and professional interests related to their engagement in the (cultural) public sphere (Couldry et al 2007) and the media they choose to use. Different reading patterns result from the ways in which readers negotiate and use different texts and textual elements (e.g. critical debate in a review) for different purposes (e.g. relaxation, entertainment, information, education etc.). Thus, the article explores whether and how the use of journalism on culture is interrelated with more universal processes of meaning production, and therefore it draws on a socio-cognitive perspective, especially in regard to schemes of expectation and experience (e.g. Bruun 2004; Waldahl 1998; Engebretsen 1998).
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Audience views on user-generated content: exploring the value of news from the bottom up
Authors: Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Andrew Williams and Claire WardleNews organizations increasingly view user-generated content (UGC) as a vital resource for audience engagement and empowerment. Researchers have investigated the production practices and journalistic cultures surrounding UGC, but have paid less attention to the audiences who produce and consume the content. This article seeks to fill this gap in knowledge, drawing on a series of focus groups to understand why audiences value particular forms of UGC and renounce others. Further, by comparing focus group findings to data from in-depth interviews with BBC producers and journalists, it explores how audience perceptions differ from those of producers. In particular, the article focuses on why and how audiences value news-based UGC (in the form of images, footages and eyewitness accounts), which is perceived as authentic, immediate and real. This is contrasted with a dislike for audience comment, or opinion-based contributions, seen as ill-informed, repetitive and extremist. By contrast, BBC producers and journalists are more concerned with UGC as a tool to supplement traditional news-gathering practices.
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Age, generation and the media
Authors: Göran Bolin and Eli Skogerbø
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