Purpose: The paper investigates the relationship between accounting and promises in the context of digital change.

Design/methodology/approach: Relying on emergent literature on accounting and promises, a qualitative field study has been conducted covering 57 interviews with municipal directors, digitalization strategists, administration managers and CFOs in a Swedish region consisting of 13 municipalities.

Findings: The paper provides insights into how municipalities draw on accounting in attempts to reconstruct promissory narratives of the digital. By highlighting two contrasting cases, we show how this can involve practices of either restoration or transformation. Likewise, we find that attempts to restore promises can sometimes have unanticipated effects, in our case a transformation of the promise instead.

Originality/value: We introduce a “promise” lens to the literature on accounting and digital change and empirically describe how accounting is implicated in shaping promises in the context of public sector digital change.

News organizations have been under financial pressure to streamline their activities for decades. Critics argue that this pressure undermines the quality of news, posing a severe threat to democracy. However, the effects of media consolidation on news quality are theoretically ambiguous and empirical evidence is scarce. To address this gap, we study the case of the Swedish newspaper industry between 2014 and 2022, a period where more than half of the country’s newspapers changed their owners. We collect over 2 million articles from 108 newspapers and apply state-of-the-art computational methods to create theoretically grounded, fine-grained measures of news content quality. Our results indicate that mergers are associated with slight increases in content quality. However, we also find evidence of content homogenization, as merging newspapers tend to slightly decrease their provision of local news, while relying more on content shared with co-owned newspapers.

Media freedom is often seen as the main value against which the quality of media systemsis judged. While the levels of media freedom in Europe are generally higher than the world average,there are yet significant variations in how certain European countries score on media freedomindices and scales. This paper uses comparative quantitative data and applies the fsQCA methodto analyze how macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of journalism as a field relate to different levelsof media freedom in Europe. The results suggest that media market structure, journalistic skills,and journalists adhering to the monitorial role of journalism constitute the “core” conditions forthe implementation of media freedom.

Involvement in deliberative communication presupposes that participants are well-informed about the topics they are discussing. Without proper, factual and up-to-date information, one is not able to participate successfully in deliberative interactions. One of the main functions of the media in society is to inform the populace, thus enabling a “public connection” between the people and significant subjects (Couldry et al., 2010).  

People have developed different ways “to be involved” in society or to search for information in today’s hybrid media environment (Chadwick, 2013). On the one hand, the media repertoires people develop (Adoni et al., 2017; Hasebrink & Domeyer, 2012) are created in the framework of available channels and content in a particular country. On the other hand, these repertoires are also shaped by individuals’ informational preferences and abilities. If we view the available media channels as conditions for media use, the interest of audiences and their need to follow media channels becomes even more relevant. Monitoring the aims, methodologies and results of research on audiences’ media use allows us to posit questions that aim to detect possible risks and opportunities for people’s participation in public deliberation: (1) Do existing studies on news media use give an adequate picture of the information spaces people live in and what media do different audience groups use? (2) Does existing research reveal what information providers audience groups trust? (3) Does existing research help us assess the ability of audience groups to differentiate between trustworthy and false information? Thus, the constant and focused monitoring of media use can inform us about the risks related to the media’s deliberative role in society. Risks can derive from the inaccessibility of relevant content and poor quality of media provision and can 135 Monitoring Mediascapes Mediadelcom manifest as low levels of trust in the media, interest in common issues and poor skills in the use and evaluation of media content. To evaluate the risks and opportunities (ROs) that derive from the monitoring (or lack thereof) of audience media use, we have analysed the monitoring of the following three aspects of media use as the most indicative variables: access to media, relevance of news media and trust in media. Audience media usage competencies are also relevant to participation in deliberative interactions and will be discussed in the current chapter.

The basic idea behind this chapter is to partly bridge the gap in previous deliberation studies by offering a sustainable model for operationalizing deliberation empirically in a comparative context. The chapter introduces the key concept of deliberation and its associated basic ideals in social science studies and overviews empirical applications of news media's deliberative performance in journalism and political communication studies. Basic principles behind the operationalization of the concept as an outcome variable of a fuzzy-set analysis are discussed and motivated. A deliberative communication index is calculated based on macro/meso level and micro-level data. Among the 14 analysed cases in the comparison, Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Austria, and Greece belong to the set of high deliberative communication, while Italy, Latvia, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Hungary are out of the set of countries with high deliberative communication.

The assumption that ownership has an effect on the diversity of news is based on the forms of control that ownership allows and the market conditions in which ownership is exercised. In this study, we perform a large-scale analysis of the Swedish newspaper market, surveying 130 newspapers and parliamentary speeches over a period of six years (2014-2019), to substantiate to what extent market and for-profit ownership forms impact political viewpoint diversity. Our analysis shows that newspapers with market leadership and chain ownership offer more political viewpoint diversity than number two and single-owned papers. In contrast, the ownership forms surveyed here (private, foundation, and publicly traded ownerships) display little effect on newspapers' internal diversity. We also find that a greater number of papers in a local market does not imply more external diversity in that market. The analysis thus offers some nuance to the notion that ownership form and market pluralism are prerequisites for viewpoint diversity, highlighting instead the importance of scale effects for pluralistic media systems.

This paper explores the intersection between sustainability and social media activity by studying how user-generated content (UGC) creation enacted and communicated social sustainability in times of restricted social interaction. The context is Wuhan in China, a city that implemented a 76-day lockdown in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sample of 187 short videos created and posted by Wuhan residents on Douyin (TikTok) during the lockdown, this paper answers this question - how did UGC creators produce short videos on social media to facilitate social connections with others? UGC creators' video-making practices are conceptualised in the typology of Evoking, Performing, Collaborating, and Narrating, and each practice enabled creators to connect and socialise virtually with others, thus contributing to all participants' social sustainability in a pandemic. This study contributes to media management scholarship by adding knowledge to the understanding of two areas: the productive role of media audiences, especially their content production practices and logics; the nature of short videos as media products.

Ur inledningen: Det här kapitlet handlar om nyhetsproducenter som aktörer på kommersiella mediemarknader. Samtidigt som journalistiken fyller viktiga samhällsuppgifter, så bedrivs den inom ramen för företag och organisationer som vill vara långsiktigt ekonomiskt hållbara. Det betyder att även företag och organisationer som inte har som sitt huvudsakliga syfte att berika sina ägare, ändå behöver tjäna tillräckligt med pengar för att kunna betala löner, investera i ny teknologi och utveckla sina produkter. Man skapar därför produkter och tjänster som man hoppas ska efterfrågas och generera intäkter. Man gör även åtgärder för att öka sin publik, sin prenumerantbas, annonsintäkter eller andra affärsaktiviter. För den sakens skull är begrepp som ’företagsstrategi’, ’affärsmodell’, ’innovation’, ’entreprenörskap’ och ’varumärke’, komponenter som kan hjälpa oss att förstå mediesektorns utveckling och medieföretagens agerande.

The purpose of this contribution is to examine more precisely how professional journalism can contribute to deliberative communication and democracy in the European context. Which structural conditions and which factors are essential? We begin with theorizing what will be referred to as the journalism domain, i.e. the various aspects of journalism considered. We do this through a combination of media sociological, media theoretical, and political communication-oriented thinking. Then we operationalize the role of journalism for deliberative communication/democracy into a few variables, which is then paving the way for our analysis of the condition of journalism in 14 EU countries during 2000–2020. We present some results from existing national case study reports. Finally, we provide some concluding comments on how to interpret the data with a focus on the capacity of journalism to contribute to deliberative communication and democracy in the different countries.

This article explores institutions that monitor news media performance. It opens up critical inquiry into how knowledge about media systems is shaped, shared, and bounded in society. Using Sweden as an illustrative and data‐rich case, we first map the overall media monitoring structure in Sweden. Second, we examine the kind of knowledge and data about media that monitoring institutions produce, including their motives and the underlying values they support. Third, we extrapolate questions about implicit and explicit motives to participate in an “information regime.” Fourth, by means of media system theory, we discuss the international relevance of the Swedish case to understand media monitoring systems in other parts of the world.