A Small Exclusive Circle : An Institutional Approach to Business News

This article features a comparative study of the making of business news based upon interviews (2005 to 2010) with senior business journalists in Finland and Sweden as well as communication managers at two global telecom companies, Nokia and Ericsson. The article shows the complex and fluid dynamics of social construction. There are spans when corporate power over editorial practices is strong and other periods when business reporters and their supervisors effectively exert their control over these news processes and the construction of meaning. Communicative outcomes are not determined or predictable; rather, they are influenced by a socially grounded understanding of what is “appropriate”. This case study shows that formal rules can be of limited value when assessing social processes.Peer reviewe

A Small Exclusive Circle : An Institutional Approach to Business News

This article features a comparative study of the making of business news based upon interviews (2005 to 2010) with senior business journalists in Finland and Sweden as well as communication managers at two global telecom companies, Nokia and Ericsson. The article shows the complex and fluid dynamics of social construction. There are spans when corporate power over editorial practices is strong and other periods when business reporters and their supervisors effectively exert their control over these news processes and the construction of meaning. Communicative outcomes are not determined or predictable; rather, they are influenced by a socially grounded understanding of what is “appropriate”. This case study shows that formal rules can be of limited value when assessing social processes.Peer reviewe

Automating the News : How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media

Book review. Reviewed work: Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media / by Nicholas Diakopoulos. - Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2019, 322 pp., (hard cover), ISBN 9780674976986.Non peer reviewe

What makes a reporter human? : A research agenda for augmented journalism

In french: Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un journaliste est humain ? Un programme de recherche pour un journalisme augmentéPeer reviewe

Åland – a peculiar media system

This article captures the dynamics of a special case when it comes to media systems, namely the Aland Islands, or Aland, with 6,700 islands and 30,000 inhabitants. Aland is one of three self-governed areas in the Nordic region (the others being the Faroe Islands and Greenland) and is an officially monolingual Swedish-speaking part of Finland, where the majority speak Finnish. In this article, I describe how Aland, despite its small size, has a media system characterised by a diverse and complete offering of local media: two daily newspapers, its own public service and public service offerings from both mainland Finland and neighbouring Sweden, a commercial radio station, and several magazines. However, media diversity is limited by the fact that the same person - a local business tycoon, Anders Wiklof - controls both newspapers. There is one main research question motivating this study: What are the specific features of the media system in Aland? To be able to answer that, I relied on the analysis of three sets of data: nine interviews, a two-part survey and the media policy adopted in 2018, and transcripts of the preceding political debate.Peer reviewe

Algorithms for journalism : The future of news work

Software-generated news, sometimes called “robot journalism,” has recently given rise to concerns that the automation of news will make journalists redundant. These arguments follow a deterministic line of thinking. Algorithms choose information for users but are also the construct of social process and practice. The aim of this essay is to explore “the algorithmic turn” (Napoli, 2014a) in news production. Based on case studies from three separate news outlets it is found that the impact of automated news is, first, increased efficiency and job satisfaction with automation of monotonous and error-prone routine tasks; second, automation of journalism routine tasks resulting in losses of journalist jobs; and third, new forms of work that require computational thinkingPeer reviewe

Media Innovation in a Strange Place : Newspaper Differentiation on Åland

Peer reviewe

Journalistiken som ideal

Journalistutbildningen ska svara på många utmaningar. Nya journalister förväntas behärska en stor mängd digitala arbetsredskap, inklusive analys och visualisering av data och förståelse av algoritmer. De måste kunna rapportera i realtid i alla format. Därtill förväntas de ha substanskunskap om hur samhället fungerar inklusive kommun, ekonomi, rättsprocesser och globala frågor. Där tar den pedagogiska utmaningen inte slut. De fasta anställningarna är snart ett minne blott.Peer reviewe

Data Journalism as a Service : Digital Native Data Journalism Expertise and Product Development

The combined set of skills needed for producing data journalism (e.g., investigative journalism methods, programming, knowledge in statistics, data management, statistical reporting, and design) challenges the understanding of what competences a journalist needs and the boundaries for the tasks journalists perform. Scholars denote external actors with these types of knowledge as interlopers or actors at the periphery of journalism. In this study, we follow two Swedish digital native data journalism start-ups operating in the Nordics from when they were founded in 2012 to 2019. Although the start-ups have been successful in news journalism over the years and acted as drivers for change in Nordic news innovation, they also have a presence in sectors other than journalism. This qualitative case study, which is based on interviews over time with the start-up founders and a qualitative analysis of blog posts written by the employees at the two start-ups, tells a story of journalists working at the periphery of legacy media, at least temporarily forced to leave journalism behind yet successfully using journalistic thinking outside of journalistic contexts.Peer reviewe