On Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and weblogs, consumer activity is increasingly institutionalized, guarded by rules and norms. Consumers take on tasks previously performed by trained media workers, but they also create new activities, emerging as a new breed of media workers, institutionalizing new fields of the media and advertising industries and their associated practices (Dolbec and Fischer 2015). It has been described how amateur workers develop new ethical norms and rules for publishing, by taking journalistic/editorial decisions on what content to publish and how, within their new institutional domain (Abidin & Ots, 2015).

This paper is focused on a specific group of stakeholders – everyday Internet users who manufacture themselves into a new form of social media microcelebrity known as the ‘Influencer’ (Abidin 2015). Since 2005, many young women have taken to social media to craft ‘microcelebrity personas’ as a career – “a new style of online performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites” (Senft 2008: 25). In their most basic capacity, Influencers produce advertorials on blogs and social media platforms in exchange for payment or sponsored products and services (Abidin 2015). Owing to their power to shape purchase decisions, their clients have progressed from small home businesses to bluechip companies including Canon, Gucci, and KLM. Until recently, the most effective advertorials are those that are seamlessly woven into the daily narratives Influencers publish on their blogs and social media, such that readers are unable to tell apart ‘paid opinions’ from ‘unpaid’ sentiments (Abidin 2014). However, along with the maturity of the field, there is a gradual standardization of new advertising formats.

The conducted study explores how semi-professional microcelebrity Influencers create advertising market innovations. Researchers have previously described how consumer fans help firms innovate (e.g. Füller et al 2008), and how fan cultures celebrate their favourite brands by creating their own advertisements (Muniz & Schau 2005; for overview see Ots & Hartmann 2015). This paper takes a slightly different approach – rather than seeing consumers as co-creators, it demonstrates how new actors outside the traditional media and advertising industries, make innovations that compete with the incumbents. We focus on these vernacular advertising innovations in the age of social media, and seek to understand how Influencers orientate towards a youth market in the saturated, visually dominated attention economy of Instagram. The findings include a typology of innovative advertising formats emerging outside the traditional media companies, along with their associated publishing rules as defined by the semi-professional Influencers.

The data draws on a larger study of social media Influencers in Singapore since mid-2010, including over a year of intensive participant observation conducted with these Influencers in the flesh in the capacity of various roles. These interactions and observations were archived in extensively detailed field diaries. 120 personal interviews were conducted with Influencers, Influencer management agencies, (prospective) clients, readers, and friends and family of Influencers between December 2011 and July 2013. Social media content from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, AskFM, and popular public forums was archived until December 2015. Fieldwork entailed continued interaction with other actors involved in the Influencers’ social milieu, including their peers, backend production management, sponsors and advertisers, and readers. As such, although the data is drawn mainly from the textual and visual content of publically accessed blogs and associated social media platforms including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, the analysis is highly contextualised and shaped by long-term ethnographic work among these Influencers. 

This chapter discusses the emerging practices of social media Influencers. In focus are six influential Instagram Influencers who were ‘exposed’ for involving themselves in campaigns aiming to discredit telecommunications providers in Singapore. In the absence of enforced legal boundaries and industry norms regarding advertising formats and advertising ethics, brand scandals are frequent, causing concern among regulators, brand managers, and platform owners. When starting to accommodate commercial brands and contents in social media posts, Influencers are constantly at risk of breaching their contract of trust with their followers. The case study shows how Influencers, followers, and eventually also the brand clients, are sensitive to what they experience as deceptive and unethical behaviours that will put normative pressures onto the Influencers to conform to certain ethical standards.

The new "liquid" media environment involves a range of new professions, practices and practitioners (Deuze 2011). Based on a rich ethnographic study containing personal interviews and participant observation, this paper looks at semi-professional Influencers in the social media marketing industry and asks how these new branding professions and their practices emerge and institutionalize. Specifically, the material draws on data collected between 2011 and 2015 among women Influencers in the ‘lifestyle’ genre in Singapore who advertise products and services in the industry verticals of Fashion, Beauty, and Electronic goods on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram.

Whereas media ownership issues have interested scholars for decades, research has largely ignored the implications of specific ownership forms on the corporate governance of media companies, that is, how these companies are directed and controlled. This article attempts to address this gap by exploring the corporate governance of the ownership form of business foundations—a type of ownership that is increasing in different countries around the world. We analyze the corporate governance of three business foundations in the Swedish newspaper sector that together hold 26% of the market and outperform their industry peers. The control function, which is at the heart of corporate governance, is typically performed by companies’ owners. However, foundations do not have a physical person as owner; thus, this control function is replaced by the foundation’s charter, which stipulates the aim of the foundation’s business activities. When steered by professional top management, the charter’s long-term orientation facilitates the careful implementation of strategic directions without short-term performance pressures. We conclude the article by outlining several advantages and disadvantages of this ownership form for the media industry. 

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Swedish media developments between 2000 and 2020 in terms of critical junctures. This includes examination of media developments in relation to four defined domains (Legal and Ethical Regulation: Journalism; Media Usage Patterns, and Media User-Related Competencies). In this paper we ask how the Swedish developments within the four domains can be understood in terms of opportunities and risks connected to deliberate communication. In the Swedish case, what seems to be significative is the relative absence of clearly defined country-specific junctures. Mostly, we observe many small, incremental changes and gradual developments of risks.

In this report, we present available data about Swedish media development during the period 2000-2020, but also relevant context to understand the production and availability of these data, and the main monitoring actors. To be precise, in accordance with the theoretical framework of the Mediadelcom project, we focus on data about legal and ethical legislation, journalistic production, media usage, and media competencies. The overall conclusion is that, in the Swedish case, there is in most instances no lack of reliable data about media development, which also means that there are good prospects for mapping such development. Instead, the challenge in this context is often how to select data, and a combination of different data, to give an objective overview of the media development in relation to topics such as deliberative communication and deliberative democracy.

This edited volume, which elaborates on the idea and concept of sustainable journalism, is the result of a perceived lack of integral research approaches to journalism and sustainable development. Thirty years ago, in 1987, Our Common Future, the report from the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Report), pointed out economic growth, environmental protection and social equality as the three main pillars of a sustainable development. These pillars are intertwined, interdependent, and need to be balanced and reconciled. Economic growth is in this sense necessary for a developing world, but a one-sided focus on economy will eventually lead to a world that is both socially and environmentally poorer. Obviously, the issue of sustainability has not been absent from the field of journalism research; on the contrary, there is plenty of research focusing on journalism and environmental sustainability (e.g., climate change, fracking, renewables, etc.), social sustainability (e.g., democratic and political participation, poverty, inequality), and economic sustainability (e.g., ownership, commercialization, business models). However, where journalism studies traditionally treat these three aspects of sustainability disjointedly, this book attempts to pull them closer together and integrally approach sustainable development in its environmental, social and economic sense.

The book departs from the premise that journalism has a role to play in global sustainable development—to inform, investigate and to educate in ways that reconcile the three pillars. It also raises questions about the internal sustainability of journalism itself, asking how its rampant need for economically sustainable business models can possibly be negotiated with its social and environmental obligations and impacts. In this way, the concept of sustainable journalism interlinks two current sustainability challenges that are of great theoretical relevance and in urgent need of empirical research.

This edited volume, which elaborates on the idea and concept of sustainable journalism, is the result of a perceived lack of integral research approaches to journalism and sustainable development. Thirty years ago, in 1987, the Brundtland Report pointed out economic growth, social equality and environmental protection as the three main pillars of a sustainable development. These pillars are intertwined, interdependent, and need to be reconciled. However, usually, scholars interested in the business crisis of the media industry tend to leave the social and environmental dimensions of journalism aside, and vice versa. What Is Sustainable Journalism? is the first book that discusses and examines the economic, social and environmental challenges of professional journalism simultaneously. This unique book and fresh contribution to the discussion of the future of journalism assembles international expertise in all three fields, arguing for the necessity of integral research perspectives and for sustainable journalism as the key to long-term survival of professional journalism. The book is relevant for scholars and master’s students in media economy, media and communication, and environmental communication.

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.

Denna rapport är en sammanfattning av forskningsprojektet ”Medialiserad shopping”. Utgångspunkten har varit ett intresse för hur digital teknik i allmänhet, och smarta telefoner i synnerhet, påverkar shopping i butik. De senaste tjugo åren har vi upplevt hur e-handelssektorn genomgått en kontinuerlig expansion och hur en allt större del av våra inköp kommit att göras online. Samtidigt hade vi inför projektet en känsla av att kunskapen om matvarubutiker och deras relation till den nya digitala tekniken var otillräcklig – i synnerhet som användandet av smarta telefoner i praktiken innebär att konsumenter tar med sig sina egna datorer till butiken och på så sätt skapar en köpupplevelse som på samma gång är fysisk och digital. Hur påverkar detta oss konsumenter och vårt sätt att handla?

För detaljhandelns del så ligger ännu så länge utvecklingen av shoppingappar, användande av platsbaserad teknik, individualisering och digitala tjänster i butik i sin linda. Vi har bara påbörjat utforskandet av hur shoppingupplevelsen i butik kan berikas och förädlas med hjälp av digital teknik.

Inom ramen för detta projekt har vi under de gångna två åren utfört ett antal studier på en rad olika platser, och denna rapport sammanfattar och presenterar några av de viktigaste resultaten från vårt arbete. Vi är givetvis mycket tacksamma gentemot alla de som hjälpt oss längs vägen och vill passa på att tacka Handelsrådet (Andreas Hedlund, Lena Strålsjö och Jenny Dahlerus), deltagande företag, sponsorer och deltagare i referensgrupper.

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.

Research Summary: There is growing consensus that exogenous environmental changes can affect entrepreneurship. The external enabler framework, which provides the structures and terminology to analyze these enabling effects, has typically focused on new venture creation. In an attempt to extend the external enabler framework to corporate entrepreneurship and innovation, our longitudinal multiple-case study explores how environmental changes enable entrepreneurial initiatives in existing organizations. Our findings contribute to the external enabler framework, corporate entrepreneurship, and innovation literature by identifying new conceptual tools to understand the enabling effect of environmental change for the emergence, novelty, and persistence of entrepreneurial initiatives in existing organizations.

Managerial Summary: We studied how the Covid-19 pandemic enabled the initiation and continuation of entrepreneurial activities. Our study of eight small US-based news companies shows that some entrepreneurial initiatives emerged as these organizations redirected their course of action toward new initiatives enabled by the changes in the external environment. Notably, the entrepreneurial initiatives that were new-to-the-industry originated from ideas that were already available in some form within the organization but were not in use until the pandemic gave them a second life. Furthermore, the continuation of these initiatives depended on the persistence of the changes in the environment and on the low maintenance requirements of these initiatives in terms of time, effort, and resources.

Personal branding is a rapidly growing phenomenon taking place in multistakeholder ecosystems. This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork from the rock-climbing industry in the US and Europe to show how stakeholders enable and shape the personal branding practices of professional climbers. Findings demonstrate that personal branding is a highly social practice wherein stakeholders provide three types of resources to elaborate personal brands: material resources, informational resources, and symbolic resources. In addition, six main conventions guiding stakeholders' relationships and enabling resource transfer are then identified and theorized. Finally, these findings are built upon to suggest a framework to analyze stakeholder cooperation in personal branding.

PurposeBuilding on Kavaratzis and Hatch's (2013) identity-based place branding model, this paper aims to explore the spatial and social dimensions of the place brand identity formation process and how residents used social media to participate in the process of shaping a city brand during a crisis. Design/methodology/approachAdopting an interpretive and social constructionist approach, this study analyses a sample of 187 short videos created and posted by Wuhan residents on the social media app Douyin during a COVID-19 lockdown. The authors read the videos as cultural texts and analysed underlying social processes in the construction of place brand identity by residents. FindingsThis study develops an adapted conceptual model of place identity formation unfolding in four sub-processes: expressing, impressing, mirroring and reflecting, and each sub-process subsumes two dimensions: the social and the spatial. In addition, this study empirically describes how residents participated in place branding processes in two ways, namely, their construction of city brand identity via communicative practice and their exertion of changes to a city brand during a crisis. The model reveals how place brands emerge and can be transformed. Originality/valueThis paper amplifies Kavaratzis and Hatch's (2013) identity-based place branding model by testing it in an empirical study and highlighting the social and spatial dimensions. This paper contributes to research about participatory place branding by exploring how residents participated in the place branding process. This study analysed short videos on social media, a new communication format, rather than textual narratives dominating past studies.

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.

In the context of Wuhan, a Chinese city that implemented a 76-day Covid-19 lockdown and became closely associated with the pandemic, this paper examines how citizens used social media production to compensate the loss of physical meetings and enable social connection. Based on qualitative analysis of short videos on the Douyin app created by Wuhan citizens, the paper outlines (1) how interpersonal relations were embedded in videographic content, and (2) how videographic techniques were used to reproduce stay-at-home experiences of socializing virtually with others. The paper contributes to research about consumers’ responses to threats, videographic consumer research, and media management scholarship.

Whereas the production-side of advertising has interested scholars for decades, research has focused primarily on isolated agency practices and interactions with clients. There has been limited discussion of how an ad agency coordinates and connects multiple activities and relationships, and how the agency setup has evolved over time. This question has become particularly interesting in the age of digitization, in which new forms of advertising require new ways of organizing production. In a case study of Forbes’s BrandVoice unit, this paper specifically examines native advertising production via the business model lens, illustrating how BrandVoice consciously borrows production logics from journalism and distribution practices of platform economies. This study contributes to the understanding of the morphing of advertising production and agency work in the digital economy.

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 aims to elucidate the phenomenon of online Mash-Up as one type of consumer generated media (CGM). This phenomenon provides a suitable context for theorizing onthe changing nature of production and consumption and an emerging resource-based view on consumption. Based on netnographic inquiries we contribute a first systematic assessment and categorization of the phenomenon for further study of CGM and value creation in media spheres. We propose three types of Mash-Up and introduce the notion of Mash-Into clarify the difference between combinatorial and compositional logics. The paper concludes with a discussion and future research agenda.

Digitalization has altered many assumptions underpinning research on innovation management. At the early innings of exploring how digital innovation management stands out, there is a need for further studies in this area. Previous research on how firms use artificial intelligence has distinguished between automation and augmentation of human activities. In this paper, we explore how firms implement artificial intelligence within research and development. Utilizing an international news database spanning 956 articles from 122 newspapers published in 2020, we find that artificial intelligence is primarily adopted to augment human activities (55%) within research and development, rather than to automate matters (11%). We observe differences across sectors where automation is more common in government, information and communication technology (ICT), and technology and software. Our systematic coding shows that artificial intelligence is primarily adopted for exploration research and development (64%), rather than exploitation (5%). Based on these findings, we conclude that research and development from artificial intelligence primarily focuses on novel markets and areas of operations, rather than enhancing existing product markets and activities. Moreover, it augments human labor rather than replaces it; hence, job losses related to artificial intelligence do not seem to be taking place within research and development.

Media business research has been growing rapidly in the Nordic region. In a highly internationalised field of research, is there a line of enquiry that is distinctively Nordic? Through an analysis of papers and articles presented at NordMedia or published in the two major journals, we summarize the main methodological, theoretical, and empirical characteristics of the Nordic contribution to the field.

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.

For over two centuries, technology has reshaped professional work. In most cases, these changes were positive as they have created new areas of work for professions and destroyed relatively few. Recently, however, technological change i.e. digitalization has also negatively impacted professionals with numerous professions, such as journalist, doctors, accountants. While research has extensively focused on digital technologies, per se, research has ignored its effect on the agents implementing technologies i.e. professionals. We suggest that organizing digitalization involves not only recombining physical and digital technologies but also reconstructing institutional professions. We use a comparative case study of two of the oldest Swedish newspaper companies to present: 1) two paths to build digital capabilities i.e. building digital capabilities or acquiring digital capabilities and 2) detail a change in the professional practices. Our results portray how digitalization changed professionals from doing occupational tasks to build collaborative relations with other professions.

The chapter explores the regulatory framework and the types of media innovation policies formulated and implemented in Sweden. In particular, the country's analysis illustrates the evolution and structure of news media markets and media cross-ownership policies in recent years and evaluates how innovation policies stimulate innovative activities in journalism and news media. 

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.

Media firms create value by attracting and aggregating audiences that are relevant and actionable for advertisers. Traditionally, these mass audiences are measured and sold in demographic chunks. Such measurement practices and standards support comparability between media but remain on the other hand largely unsuitable for explaining the patterns of behavior that advertisers ultimately want to influence. From this perspective traditional media do surprisingly little to refine, repackage and enhance the value, flexibility and versatility of their audiences. An important challenge for audience measurement researchers and professionals has therefore been to build a connection between what media we consume and what products we purchase that is more reliable than purely demographic segmenting. Through a case study of Sweden’s largest retailer ICA this paper illustrates how proprietary channels of communication are apt to seamlessly translate marketing target groups to communication target group. Commercialization of this capability puts retail firm ICA in direct competition with traditional mass media for suppliers’ advertising budgets.

A wave of mergers has reshaped the Swedish newspaper market over the past decade. Competition has been gradually replaced with collaboration, block-building and alliances. In 11 out of 15 cities with more than one daily newspaper, a single owner controls the entire market. Based a mail survey and a short case study, this paper asks how newspapers on these markets balance professional areas of competition and collaboration, without compromising strategic differentiation, customer confidence and journalistic independence.

For more than 30 years, Sweden’s media policy has relied on positive incentives to promote diversity. That is, competition law has rarely been used to prevent dominant newspapers from acquiring smaller ones, but rather press subsidies have been used to increase survival rates and promote independence among the latter. Internationally, the broad trend toward concentration in newspaper markets has been of concern to policy makers, and the Swedish model has attracted considerable interest as a possible path to a more heterogeneous media landscape. However, over the last decade, ownership distribution on the newspaper market has started to change at an accelerating pace, and Swedish media policy stands at a crossroad to increase reliance on subsidies or to make way for something new. The arising questions regarding how to reshape media policy have several parallels to the ongoing international debate. This case study explores the performance of subsidies from the perspective of pluralism and discusses alternative political responses and future policy directions.