rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Nordicom Reviewhttps://sciendo.com/journal/NORhttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/64725d2b215d2f6c89dc5885/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/NOR140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0025ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00252024-12-15T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0024<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This study examines the impact of crises on the use of populist communication and whether crises act as triggers for such communication. Whereas previous studies have focused on how populist challengers mobilise support during times of crisis, less attention has been paid to the overall usage of populist communication among political parties during periods of crisis. Therefore, this study takes a communication-oriented approach to analyse the overall usage of populist communication during two different crises, namely the euro crisis and the refugee crisis, to determine which one, if either, provides fertile ground for populist political communication. The findings reveal that crises do affect the usage of populist communication, although to different degrees depending on the crisis. Furthermore, niche and opposition parties utilise such communication more than mainstream and government parties. It is therefore suggested that crises influence the use of populist messaging, but factors such as government role and party status also significantly affect the usage of populist communication.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00242024-11-01T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0023<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The emotional and confessional nature of mental health disclosures on television sometimes induces audiences to share their own personal stories of mental health struggles in return. The term testimony loop is suggested to conceptualise this phenomenon, whereby Norwegian television participants become receivers of many audience testimonies through private messages on social media platforms. The participants represent the programme to the public and perform emotional labour through interacting with the audience and engaging with the testimonies received. While some television participants in this study, particularly the females, genuinely appreciated their role as helpers, others found this appeal to interact emotionally strenuous. By way of the television participants’ own attestations, this study seeks to enrich the understanding of the complexities involved in confessing personal stories of illness, suffering, and trauma within the context of mass media.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00232024-10-08T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0022<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The notion of intervention is gaining traction among Western environmental journalists. While existing research has predominantly focused on countries outside the Nordic region, in our study we investigate the self-perceptions of professional journalists in the Nordic countries of Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine the roles that Nordic journalists construct when reflecting on covering the environmental beat, paying particular attention to how they make sense of the idea of intervening – that is, their involvement in interpreting, making sense of, and engaging the public in environmental issues. Using thematic qualitative analysis to analyse the interviews, we have identified four journalistic roles: 1) objective news provider, 2) critical watchdog, 3) sense-maker and educator, and 4) environmental advocate. Our findings suggest that Nordic journalists intervene byadhering to professional norms and practices and renegotiating them. While the role of objective news provider remains prominent among Nordic journalists, it is intertwined with various forms of intervention across all identified roles.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00222024-10-06T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0021<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Studies on news avoidance rely on a range of theories to explain why news avoidance takes place and its potential consequences, and the debates on different ways of measuring news avoidance have been lively. Despite the numerous approaches and conceptualisations, there is room to theorise what news avoidance entails as a social phenomenon. In this study, we posit that news avoidance can fruitfully be approached as a form of negative social action embedded in a negative social space – a realm of the lifeworld filled with non-doings and non-appearance. We apply this approach, which opens up new questions in the field of news avoidance studies, to a case study of Swedes who opted out of national public service news in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that avoiders of public service news occupy relatively precarious social positions, and that news avoidance is embedded in a broader negative social space.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00212024-10-02T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0020<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Recently, Power-to-X (PtX) has come to play a prominent role in the public discussion of a green energy future, with high hopes expressed by political and business players. In the Danish news media, PtX has experienced a steep rise in attention, which calls for studies of how PtX is made sense of as a societal, not only a technological, phenomenon. Informed by the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, this article investigates the local introduction of PtX in Frederica, one of the forerunner towns for PtX in Denmark, as represented in the coverage of the daily newspaper <italic>Fredericia Dagblad</italic>. The study analyses how PtX is made sense of by being connected to local actors, circumstances, and imagined futures. Two diverging sociotechnical imaginaries are identified, centring on 1) local (business) cooperation for green energy solutions towards a PtX adventure, and 2) concerns for scarce nature in a densely industrialised area. The findings show both similarities with and differences to already known mediatised environmental conflicts and point to dynamics between media, market, politics, and civil society in future mediatised environmental conflicts.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00202024-09-26T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0019<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00192024-09-20T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0017ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00172024-06-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0018<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Through an interpretive, user-centred approach, in this article I investigate a frequently overlooked dimension of online political engagement: spectating. Drawing on mini focus groups with Norwegian young adults, I challenge depictions of so-called lurking as antisocial and unproductive by advocating a more nuanced view of silent social media use. The findings demonstrate that spectating is viewed as a socially acceptable and meaningful activity within the participants’ broader expectations for civic behaviour. The analysis also presents active and normatively desirable activities encompassed in spectating – such as monitoring, critically consuming, and consciously curating political content – which can support citizens to maintain public connection and develop informed opinions. Ultimately, the study elevates the discussion on digital citizenship by illustrating how active spectating can serve as a meaningful and cooperative form of participation within a distributed understanding of civic engagement in an era of communicative plenty.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00182024-06-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0016<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In this article, we examine how journalists try to uphold ideals of objectivity, clarity, and epistemic authority when using four overlapping terms: fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews with journalists in Denmark, our study finds that journalists struggle to convert the ideals of clarity and objectivity into a coherent conceptual practice. Across interviews, journalists disagree on which concepts to use and how to define them, accusing academics of producing too technical definitions, politicians of diluting meaning, and journalistic peers of being insufficiently objective. Drawing on insights from journalism scholarship and rhetorical argumentation theory, we highlight how such disagreements reveal a fundamental tension in journalistic claims to epistemic authority, causing a continuous search for unambiguous terms, which in turn produces the very ambiguity that journalists seek to avoid.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00162024-04-20T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0015<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>During crises, news headlines not only communicate objective information but also express attitudes and emotions towards the reported events through different linguistic markers of evaluation. By analysing Finnish headlines from digital news sources on 16–17 March 2020, in this article we unravel how evaluative parameters, themes, and actors construct evaluative images of Covid-19 in Finnish news media. The results show how themes such as daily lives, health, and restrictive measures are evaluated, for example, through emotivity, mental state, evidentiality, and style. Findings also highlight the variety of different actors, from authorities to ordinary citizens, involved in the headlines. Consequently, three evaluative images emerge: 1) the pandemic that evokes concern and solidarity in the everyday lives of citizens; 2) the pandemic as a challenging health crisis, with the authorities as responsible decision-makers; and 3) the pandemic as a crisis that creates concern and negatively impacts the different functions of society.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00152024-04-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0014<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Nordic countries have experienced an upsurge of partisan alternative media positioning themselves as correctives of the mainstream, but only little is known about how many and who uses them. Building on original survey data from a representative sample of the adult Danish population (<italic>n</italic> = 2,455), this article presents the first study of the use of left-wing and right-wing alternative media in Denmark. Findings show that users are generally more likely to be older, male, and live in disadvantaged parts of the country, but that alternative media appeal across all levels of education and urban–rural divides. Results also show positive associations with use of national dailies and high political interest. Furthermore, use of alternative media is associated with taking ideological positions further to the left or right. Yet, the findings do not indicate that users generally take extreme positions. This study thus adds considerable nuance to the picture of alternative news users and also finds that alternative media with different degrees of alternativeness attract similar users.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00142024-03-21T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0006<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article offers a longitudinal perspective on communications during election campaigns from a political-party perspective, where strategic considerations about digital media are compared across time. Our analysis is grounded on the concepts of hybridisation and data-driven campaigning, where digital technology tends to play a central role without replacing all traditional campaign features. Empirically, the study is based on a longitudinal analysis of four election campaigns in Sweden during 2010–2022. The analysis shows that Swedish political parties have gradually integrated digital campaign features in their structure and strategy. The process is not linear, but rather back and forth, as party perceptions of the importance of communication channels vary across time. The results imply a development where all parties, regardless of size and ideology, are increasingly making rational judgments of which combinations of old and new campaign methods and communication channels are most effective.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00062024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0009<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article maps and compares digital alternative news environments in two Scandinavian countries: Sweden and Denmark. Drawing on an analysis of over 20,000 public social media accounts that have shared alternative news content on eight different social media platforms from January 2019 to March 2022, we document the importance of different types of curators, such as political actors, social media pundits, public discussion groups, and individual “hyper-tweeters”, in multiplying the reach of alternative news content on social media. The analysis reveals substantial differences in the digital curation of alternative news between the two countries, as well as between the curation of left-wing and right-wing alternative content. In the article, we discuss how different types of alternative news curation practices contribute to the formation of digital counterpublics.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00092024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0010<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article explores the contextual nature of fragmentation and polarisation – subjects that have attracted significant concern in the age of social media. I investigate the media sharing practices of Scandinavian Twitter users discussing the 2020 American presidential election, an event that attracted international attention. Using links in tweets, I map the media networks of users in Sweden and Norway in their national languages and in English. This intranational approach provides a view into whether fragmentation and polarisation are characteristic of the audience or the media milieu. The findings show Scandinavian users exhibit low audience polarisation within their national languages, but they display polarisation similar to American users when engaging with English-language media. At the same time, media fragmentation is higher in the Norwegian language than in any other sphere. This article sheds light on the relationship between the sometimes-conflated concepts of fragmentation and polarisation and provides a discussion of the implications of political information sharing on transnational digital platforms.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00102024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0005<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00052024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0007<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Social media has contributed to the spread of populist political communication, yet we still lack systematic knowledge of the contextual factors affecting its use. In this study, we investigated how and to what degree platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and party characteristics (populist vs. non-populist parties; political ideology) affected the use of populist communication by Norwegian political parties on social media during the 2021 national election campaign. Based on a tripartite conceptualisation of populist communication consisting of people-centrism, anti-elitism, and the exclusion of out-groups, we conducted a standardised content analysis of the official social media accounts of nine parties and their party leaders. Populist communication was overall rather rare, being most widespread on Facebook and least widespread on Twitter. Which parties used populist communication the most depended on the platform, and it was not always the populist Progress Party [Fremskrittspartiet] that communicated in the most populist manner. Parties located towards the fringes of the political party spectrum used more populist communication. Anti-elitism was more widespread among left-wing parties, and almost exclusively the right-wing Progress Party excluded out-groups.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00072024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0012<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article focuses on user-generated discussion threads in journalistic online publication platforms. We investigate how journalists can apply deliberative norms to promote a democratically sustainable discussion within the threads. We also examine which opportunities and challenges journalists currently see with such threads in relation to central citizen democracy principles such as user participation and interactivity. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 18 Finnish news journalists and personnel in charge of moderation strategies. The findings show that deliberative norms are used to some degree in discussion-thread moderation, and that such norms are a key factor to promote democratically sustainable discussions in media organisations. The findings also show that threads can be useful tools for promoting citizen democracy due to their participatory features, but that several current challenges affect this, including uncivil user-generated content, limited representativeness among active users, and lacking resources to handle content in smaller media organisations. One main implication is that journalists see a risk of challenges with discussion threads outweighing benefits for democracy.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00122024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0011<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>While small groups leverage disproportionate visibility online, oftentimes resorting to hostile language, the use of social media for political expression by the majority of Norwegian users has been theorised in terms of lurking, inhibition, and self-restraint. Drawing from qualitative in-depth interviews with young adults of different political orientations and ethnic-cultural backgrounds in Oslo, Norway, I take an abductivehermeneutic approach to analyse their rationale for self-censorship. The findings reveal shared frustrations and risks that explain the prevalence of lurking yet point to different coping mechanisms and expression strategies adopted by the respondents. While progressives tend to internalise their reactions by withdrawing and avoiding confrontations, conservatives more often appeal to self-censorship on the presumption of actual censorship. Different styles of media use call into question divergent ideals of democratic theory, setting self-expressive rationality at odds with deliberative norms of citizenship. I argue that this can help explain increasing perceived political polarisation and disconnection tendencies.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00112024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-0008<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Political communication has taken new and complex forms within the contemporary hybrid media system. In this article, we examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. We assess the digital television news channel Riks, which during the 2022 national election was operated by the Sweden Democrats party and distributed via YouTube. Deploying a mixed-methods approach, we analysed all videos published by Riks four weeks prior to the election. Results show that Riks blends descriptive, interpretative, and outrage genres, and strategically frames the most important political issues of the election campaign in favour of the party’s policies. Hence, the study contributes to political communication scholarship by emphasising how news has become an integral part of strategic party communication, challenging established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2024-00082024-03-12T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1