In sub-Saharan Africa, Fojo Media Institute, Wits Journalism and four other organisations are jointly promoting independent journalism and protecting the space for civil society organisations and human rights defenders in the CHARM programme. Bringing together academics, media practitioners and researchers from four universities in South Africa and Sweden, the main objective of this policy brief is to introduce the concept of sustainable journalism, defining what the concept could entail in sub-Saharan Africa and investigating the implications for media development in this context. Stakeholder discussions on the subject matter were held with relevant media actors in four countries within sub-Saharan Africa. The findings, which provide clear policy recommendations, are shared in this report.  

This method case study describes how we extracted and analyzed data from Twitter as part of a research project to investigate how users connected climate change to extreme weather events during 2008–2017. The paper describes how the open-source tool, Mecodify, was used as a fundamental part of the method to download data from Twitter and identify key insights through tables, graphs and machine-readable files. The paper goes into detail to describe the steps that were taken from the building the search query to analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing the data used to describe the findings. Although Mecodify facilitated the process significantly, the paper highlights some of the challenges that were confronted during different research stages and how they were overcome. The aim is to provide social media researchers with some useful insights for their own research.

This study examines how three types of extreme events (heat waves, droughts, floods) are mentioned together with climate change on social media. English-language Twitter use during 2008–2017 is analyzed, based on 1,127,996 tweets (including retweets). Frequencies and spikes of activity are compared and theoretically interpreted as reflecting complex relations between the extreme event factor (the occurrence of an extreme event); the media ecology factor (climate-change oriented statements/actions in the overall media landscape) and the digital action factor (activities on Twitter). Flooding was found to be by far the most tweeted of the three in connection to climate change, followed by droughts and heat waves. It also led when comparing spikes of activity. The dominance of floods is highly prevalent from 2014 onwards, triggered by flooding events (extreme event factor), the climate science controversy in US politics (media ecology factor) and the viral power of celebrities’ tweets (digital action factor).

The purpose of the study is to examine how members of a Twitter elite act together on a raised platform, thus performing “before” their manifold followers/audiences. A discourse study of Swedish public fi gures’ Twitter activities resulted in the identifi cation of three discourse types: expert sessions, professional “backstage” chatting, and exclusive lifestreaming. Altogether, they demonstrate how nationally recognized politicians, journalists, and PR consultants socialize on Twitter in a top-down manner that works against broader participation. This “elite collaborative” tweeting can be conceptualized as a particular mode of mass communication, namely few-to-many.

The purpose of this article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgment, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc., are evidence of a ‘neoliberalisation’ of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualisation of such ‘transboundary’ interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a culturalmaterialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research.

The link between extreme weather and climate change is being highlighted in ever more countries. Increased public understanding of this issue is essential for policymaking, both in terms of climate change mitigation and adaptation. As social media are becoming central to the exchange of information in society, the purpose is to analyze what generates intensified attention to the connection between extreme weather and climate change in digital communication. This is done by examining periods of intensified co-occurrence of mentions of extreme weather and climate change on English-language Twitter (N = 948,993). Our quantitative analysis suggests that during the period 2008–2017 the years 2010, 2011 and 2017 exhibit a considerable increase in ‘causality discourse’, i.e. tweets that articulate the topic of climate change + extreme weather, in comparison with earlier years. These periods of significant growth are interpreted as involving dynamic relationships between three factors, namely mediated highlighting of previous or ongoing extreme-weather events (extreme-event factor); connection of extreme weather to climate change by traditional media or other intermediaries (media-driven science communication factor); and actions of individual users (digital-action factor). Through a qualitative discourse analysis, how these factors jointly generate increasing attention to ‘causality discourse’ is more closely explored for the case of 2017.

This article theorizes the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). This work is motivated by the need to link recent large-scale ICIJ projects such as the Panama and Paradise Papers revelations to ongoing theoretical discussions about emergent forms of journalism. It is argued that the ICIJ provides evidence of the emergence of a “global network journalism” characterized by a particular epistemology (a global outlook on social reality) that is embedded in a networked rationale. It is further suggested that this journalistic practice paves the way for the media’s role as a global fourth estate, responding to the budding demand for a new type of reporting that influences political decisions and expressing society’s development toward an internalized sense of globalization. We discuss the usefulness of applying the presented concepts to other cases than the ICIJ and provide suggestions for further studies.

This study examines domestic media’s coverage of foreign wildfires from a climate change perspective. It explores Swedish newspapers’ coverage of wildfires in Australia, the Mediterranean region, and the USA during a three-year period (February 2013–March 2016), focusing on how and to what extent climate change is viewed as an underlying cause. A central result is that climate change is mentioned far more often in the case of Australian wildfires than of fires in the other two regions. Another finding is that the climate change issue became more prominent after a severe domestic wildfire in 2014. These observations are also examined qualitatively through a combined frame and discourse study where the importance of foreign news values, the use of foreign sources, cultural proximity/distance, and domestication procedures are analysed. In conclusion, foreign, domestic, and cultural factors in climate change reporting in relation to extreme events are further discussed.

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.

Human GHG emissions are entering networked everyday relations. On social media, users potentially "reveal" their carbon footprints when they post pictures of a beef-based dinner or intercontinental travel. As the increasing urgency of climate change coincides with people's increasingly online-oriented lifestyles, we suggest that social-media research should devote attention to the ways in which users overlook, hide, limit, or casually articulate their high-carbon oriented lifestyles in digital space. This would contribute important knowledge about the role of social-media communication concerning climate change as an individual responsibility, and requires a concentration on how status updates become loaded with ideological meaning (high-carbon visibility discourse). The purpose is to present a framework for critical analyses of visual disclosure of carbon footprints in social media use. Media theory, semiotics, network theory and critical theory are combined to theorize how users' activities on social media become high-carbon oriented; their promotion of a business-as-usual stance; and how this operates ideologically through reification, legitimation and unification.

Global journalism appears to become increasingly important in the field of journalism studies, however, there is no agreement about how it should be applied in research. This entry presents four perspectives: the global-mapping perspective, which is concerned with mapping and analyzing how journalism works in different parts of the world; the media-technology perspective, which focuses on the potential of cross-border media technology to facilitate the creation of a global public sphere; the ethics perspective, which deals with how journalism should approach other cultures in order to reduce the distance between "us" and "them" and minimize stereotypical depictions of the Other; and the discourse perspective, which associates global journalism with reporting that sheds light on the multitude of cross-border interdependencies between people, processes, and events. The entry also discusses the positions of "globalists" and "skeptics" in the media globalization debate and the role of journalism education in the development of global journalism.

This article explores how the powerful mechanisms of nation-state discourse in the news media obscure emerging constructions of transnational political thought and action. With the aid of empirical examples from qualitative media studies on critical events extensively covered by the news media, the article demonstrates how national identity in the news media represses transnational political identities of the intentional as well as the unintentional kind.

Idag ökar medvetenheten om mediernas viktiga roll i samhället inom olika vetenskapliga discipliner. Denna bok möter det växande kunskapsbehovet genom att på ett pedagogiskt sätt presentera en rad olika perspektiv på mediesamhället, eller närmare bestämt relationen mellan medier och samhälle; hur de förra inverkar på och medskapar det senare. Författarna tar bland annat upp frågan om vilken mediernas roll är för skapandet av maktförhållanden, offentligheter, identiteter, mobilitet, risker och interaktiva processer. Vad finns det för forskning om detta, och hur kan man inkludera medierna i sin egen samhällsforskning?Denna introduktion till studier om mediesamhället riktar sig till studenter, lärare och forskare inom medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, men också till andra samhällsvetenskapliga discipliner. Boken är skriven av medie- och kommunikationsvetare från sju universitet och högskolor i Sverige.Redaktörer är Peter Berglez och Ulrika Olausson, Örebro universitet. Övriga medverkande är: Ester Appelgren, Ulf Buskqvist, Jesper Falkheimer, Heike Graf, Mats Heide, Birgitta Höijer, André Jansson, Stig-Arne Nohrstedt, Tobias Olsson och Linda Ryan Bengtsson.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has elicited a shift from campus classrooms to distance education in higher education worldwide, shaping not only students’ experiences, but also those of teachers, especially those who never have taught online. In addition, the pandemic created a meta-context that has positioned distance education as something different from previous efforts. This study aimed to investigate higher education teachers’ experiences during the transition from classroom to online teaching by using a collective auto-ethnography method based on 13 personal stories from Swedish faculty. For the abductive approach in the analysis, a framework that combines lifelong learning theory with the context collapse concept has been applied. The disjuncture that the pandemic has elicited created a situation in which teachers had to make sense of the fact that their previous experiences did not completely fit the new situation. Context collapse, a term used to describe encounters with many audiences in social media, has been introduced to highlight the clash between professional and private contexts in online educational platforms. Based on lifelong learning theories, we suggest that context collapse should be examined in terms of how it can help improve higher education, as it holds the potential to include the entire person – body and mind – in education.

Investigative journalism across national borders is well known for the large projects, initiated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with hundreds of reporters in many countries who collaborate to produce coverage such as the Panama Papers. However, there are also many examples in the field of global investigative journalism that are microcosms of their larger counterparts. These smaller or ‘microcosm’ cross-border collaborations are instigated and carried out by a small group of reporters, possibly including freelance reporters. Like their larger counterparts, ‘microcosm investigations’ can also lead to sociopolitical change and thus are deservedly classified as investigative journalism. Microcosm investigations can therefore be viewed as part of a suggested global fourth estate that is calling power to account. The purpose of the article is to examine the characteristics of ‘microcosm’-oriented global investigative journalism and to demonstrate the similarities and differences compared with its larger and more visible counterpart. The empirical material consists of interviews with Australian journalists who were shortlisted as finalists and who won national journalism awards, sponsored by the Walkley Foundation. The findings indicate that new technologies that enable cross-border collaboration are enabling the emergence of a global fourth estate. In the concluding discussion it is argued that for the expansion and mainstreaming of global investigative journalism, the multiple small-scale projects undertaken should collectively be viewed as equally important, if not more important, than the fewer but larger and better-known collaborations. Microcosm collaborations offer opportunities for the proliferation of cross-border media coverage that can be accomplished even by relatively small media outlets.

Samverkan har kanske aldrig varit så förekommande som det är idag. Samverkan används av både offentliga och privata organisationer för att utbyta erfarenheter och uppmuntra innovativa projekt, men också för att adressera problem som ingen organisation kan lösa på egen hand. Samverkan har kommit att bli självklart för dagens organisationer. En anledning till att samverkan har ökat är på grund av de organisatoriska men också tekniska möjligheterna som idag finns att binda ihop organisationer över geografiska, institutionella och tidsmässiga avstånd. Samhället är idag avsevärt mycket mer kommunikativt ihopkopplat än bara för några decennier sedan genom den mångfald av digitala medier som tillkommit, från epost och ordbehandlingsprogram till digitala möten, samarbetsplattformar, sociala medier, och mycket mer. De utökade möjligheterna att kommunicera över tid och rum har bidragit med möjligheter att utan större ansträngning börja samverka. Med dessa ökade kontaktmöjligheter kommer också ökade förhoppningar om utsikter att hitta gemensamma riktningar, samordna resurser och finna gemensamma ageranden. Något som erfarenheter visar är lättare sagt än gjort. 

The journalism industry has used technology and cooperation to convey information around the world since the mid-1800s when six American newspapers aligned to form the Associated Press. The nonprofit news agency was a business collaboration that allowed members to share content with one another. Cooperation in journalism was not always compatible with the industry’s traditional business model, however, which valued exclusivity. As technology progressed, cooperation grew ever easier and more productive. The ultimate emergence of the internet has consummated this trend, facilitating collaborations among groups of reporters across the globe. These collaborations allow individual groups to retain and capitalize upon their geographical exclusivity while enhancing their collective ability to provide domestic stories with a transnational context or to cover cross-border or even global issues.

This paper suggests some further avenues of empirical and theoretical investigation for media research on climate change. “Old” suggestions, whose significance, as we see it, needs to be further reinforced, are included, as are “new” ones, which we hope will generate innovative research questions. In order to integrate the analysis with knowledge generated by media research at large, we revisit four research challenges that media scholars have long grappled with in the investigation of journalism: (1) the discursive challenge, i.e. the production, content and reception of media discourse; (2) the interdisciplinary challenge, i.e. how media research might engage in productive collaboration with other disciplines; (3) the international challenge, i.e. how to achieve a more diverse and complex understanding of news reporting globally; and (4) the practical challenge, i.e. how to reduce the theory–practice divide in media research.

Scholars have argued that environmental discourse in general and climate change discourse in particular have contributed to a post-politicization of the public sphere, meaning there is now an absence of deeper conflicting viewpoints about the future direction of society; capitalism has been naturalized as the only conceivable option for the organization of socio-political-ecological life. The aim of the study is to empirically explore the ways in which the post-political condition of climate change is established in public discourse. Applying an ideology-theoretical approach to a focus-group study with Swedish citizens, the article analyzes how the post-politicization of the climate issue is shaped by 1) belief in a “climate threat,” 2) personal experiences of a “climate threat,” and 3) integration of a “climate threat” into everyday practices. We conclude that the post-politicization of climate change could be explained by a consensual discourse constituted by the particularization of climate change causes, a lack of passionate emotions, and “neurotic” micro-political action.

The dataset is produced within the framework of the HORIZON 2020 project called MEDIADELCOM (Critical Exploration of Media Related Risks and Opportunities for Deliberative Communication: Development Scenarios of the European Media Landscape) in 2021-2022. The dataset is one of the 14 single-country data sets included in the consolidated file of country data sets (with 5623 entries), all in msw.xlsx format. All tables are searchable by 20 variables: full reference, year of publication, nationall/international publication, language, country the publication deals with, time of empirical data gathering, type of publication, open access/not OA, where referenced, focus on journalism domain, focus on media-related competences domain, focus on media usage patterns domain, focus on legal and ethical regulations domain, type of the approach, original key words, main topic, comments, country. As the data has been gathered specifically about the research done in four mentioned domains concerning potential ROs emanating from the news media development for deliberative communication, this database does NOT cover ALL the academic publications in the fields of media and journalism research. Consequently, the above-mentioned conditions limit the generalizations and comparisons based on the current database. 

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.