Abstract

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.

Highlights

  • Due to the considerable changes taking place in the media landscape in the last decade, the notion of a crisis in journalism has repeatedly resurfaced in the public debate and scholarly discussion

  • This study reveals that in contrast to the crisis of journalism discourse, Swedish cultural journalism is thriving both in terms of quantity and scope

  • Our results show that scholars as well as practitioners need to pay more attention to time when diagnosing problems in cultural journalism

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Summary

Introduction

Due to the considerable changes taking place in the media landscape in the last decade, the notion of a crisis in journalism has repeatedly resurfaced in the public debate and scholarly discussion. The crisis of journalism is connected to an ongoing debate among journalists and scholars about a crisis in the subfield of cultural journalism, the sources and motivations are different (Jaakkola, 2017: 51) An example of this debate spread from Denmark and Norway to Sweden in the autumn–winter of 2017, when a series of news industry-sponsored studies of the ‘decline of criticism’ were published News media environments can be likened to ecological systems, where a potential crisis for one species could be lethal for other species as well, while yet others could instead start to flourish According to such a view applied to journalism, all parts of a journalistic environment are connected and interdependent (Scolari, 2013). An important backdrop to this vulnerability is the accelerating media convergence, which makes it problematic to restrict the study of cultural journalism to newspapers only

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