Nete Nørgaard Kristensen

University of Copenhagen · Department of Communication

Despite the long history of debating its meaning and its current unprecedented ubiquity both in scholarly and popular discourses, little is systematically known about how “culture” is conceived by ordinary people. This paper examines how evaluations of the contents and boundaries of expressive culture are patterned among people in and across presen...

The paper contributes to the study of institutional trust by making a connection to “cultural backlash” theory and analyzing more recent forms of news consumption. We examine how trust in politics, media, and science is shaped by “cultural backlash” and media use in nine European countries. We employ representative survey data collected in 2021 in...

Battles over who holds authority to speak on health issues have been recurrent since the outbreak of Covid-19. This article investigates how the voices of alt. health influencers have been handled within the news-mediated public sphere during the pandemic. Alt. health influencers illustrate how new forms of authority are claimed and negotiated on s...

This article engages with a part of journalism that has long been emotional but gained less scholarly attention in recent debates about journalism and emotion—cultural criticism and reviewing. The article argues that although emotions are not new to cultural reviewing, emotionality and a subjective style have become more important in recent decades...

When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global health crisis in early 2020, memes of populist political leaders were disseminated in abundance on social media. At first sight, these political memes satirized and exposed the hazardous actions, appearances and communicative strategies of the populist leaders in this unforeseen situation that not only...

This article analyses the tensions of the cultural news beat, or what we call cultural journalism. We trace the ways in which transformations such as globalization, digitalization and conglomeration are impacting cultural journalism. We make the overall argument that these structural trends and the tensions they entail challenge cultural journalism...

This chapter makes the argument that issues related to the cultural public sphere should be considered part of the political communication circuit. Cultural journalism in the Nordic context is a central case in point. On the side of arts, popular culture, and lifestyle, Nordic cultural journalism at times includes reporting and debate about sociocu...

In this introduction, we outline the book’s overall take on the rethinking of cultural criticism in the digital age. First, we outline the book’s approach to its two key concepts, culture and criticism. Our goal is not to offer an exhaustive definition of either concept but to provide a context for the subsequent chapters and how they contribute ne...

This chapter examines how people engage across media with a combination of what is often referred to as cultural journalism, cultural criticism and information about culture beyond the domain of journalism and criticism. We focus on the Danish context as an interesting case in point considering the subsidy measures implemented to support the produc...

This edited volume examines cultural criticism in the digital age. It provides new insights into how critical authority and expertise in a cultural context are being reconfigured in digital media and by means of digital media, as the boundaries of cultural criticism and who may perform as a cultural critic are redefined or even dissolved. The book...

The Nordic countries have been termed a supermodel for political and economic governance. This anthology explores how and why the political communication systems contribute to explaining and understanding why the Nordic countries stand out as stable, democratic welfare states. The state and nation-building processes of these small European countrie...

The overall conclusion that can be drawn from the contributions in this anthology is that it is hardly relevant to talk about a clear-cut Nordic model of political communication that highly contrasts other democratic states and their political communication systems. Global trends such as digitalisation and commercialisa-tion of media systems and bl...

This article studies how people across Europe think about cultural value, including cultural heritage, and how this is related to their media usage. Drawing on data from the Eurobarometer in October 2017, which were designed with EU cultural policy goals in mind, we examine which cultural value orientations are most prevalent among citizens in Euro...

In this article, we propose de-celebrification as a term in celebrity studies to designate celebrities losing legitimacy to inhabit the public role and possess the formal and symbolic power formerly attached to their celebrity status. De-celebrification does not refer to celebrities acting scandalously, as scandalous performances often play out wit...

This article is an introduction to “cultural journalism,” a specialised type of professional journalism that covers and debates the broad field of arts and culture. The article points to some of the research traditions that have engaged with the news media's coverage of arts and culture and inspired contemporary cultural journalism research, among...

Arts, culture, and entertainment coverage is a specialized type of journalism that reports on and debates the broad cultural field. It is often referred to as “cultural journalism.” Emerging research within the field highlights the strong influence of cultural globalization as well as the commercialization and digitalization of the news industry on...

This article investigates the use of social media among a particular group of journalists: cultural journalists. Combining research on social media journalism with research on cultural journalism and applying a mix-method approach, the study shows that use of social media is still a fairly random practice in cultural newsrooms. It also shows that c...

This article presents a global-comparative study of journalists reporting about art and culture, that is, cultural journalists. In the literature, this particular group is said to be different from other types of journalists, because their professional work is guided more by an aesthetic logic than a news logic. Until now, however, this difference...

This article argues that constructive journalism scholarship should look to service journalism and its subfields, cultural journalism and lifestyle journalism, to understand the key characteristics of this newer type of journalism. Though constructive journalism is typically associated with the reporting of political and social issues, it is also s...

Spurred by digital media logics, blogs have challenged the role of the fashion industry and its mass media portfolio of fashion magazines as authoritative intermediaries of fashion. The chapter investigates how fashion blogs as a distinct type of fashion communication are influenced by the formal and informal logics of the blog as a media technolog...

Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV series Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are as follows: (1) cultural journa...

Taking a point of departure in theories about cultural (inter)mediation, this article provides a theoretical framework for explaining the pervasion of churnalism within the specialised beat of cultural journalism. Compared to other types of journalists, cultural journalists are “journalists with a difference”, since they are closely intertwined wit...

This chapter analyses Danish and Swedish editorial/op-ed and cultural opinion articles in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen in early 2015. Based on a theoretical framework detailing agonistic democracy, and deliberative and antagonistic approaches, a quantitative analysis maps who voices opinions and what conflicts and con...

Though think tanks have a long history internationally, they have especially in recent years come to play an increasingly important role in both policy-formulation and public debate. In this article, we analyse the growing presence of think tanks in a Danish context during the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, because in this national setting...

This article introduces a theoretical typology of four rival yet converging ideal types of cultural critics in contemporary media culture and in cultural journalism, more specifically, encapsulated by the term the heterogeneous cultural critic and characterized by different kinds of authority and expertise: (1) the intellectual cultural critic, who...

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term “cultural journalism and cultural critique.” In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to fra...

This article shows that blockbuster movies are predestined to receive media coverage not only because they are increasingly professionally promoted but also because they carry both “publicist” and media commercial news value. The promotional culture surrounding the blockbuster movie event, including the attention devoted to celebrity actors and dir...

I den danske såvel som den internationale radiolitteratur er bud på metoder til analyse af radiomediet sparsomme. Det skyldes formentlig, at radiomediet er svært at analysere, fordi det er et medie, der ikke er visualiseret i form af billeder eller understøttet af printet tekst. Denne artikel har til formål at beskrive en ny kvantitativ metode til...

In this comparative analysis of editorial columns in Danish newspapers, we analyze how news media can act as a political voice during times of war. Whereas most studies of media coverage of war focus on one specific war, this analysis provides empirically and theoretically grounded conclusions across three wars: Afghanistan 2001–, Iraq 2003–2007, a...

This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and convergent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemination within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well...

Taking our point of departure in ‘the cultural intermediary’ as theoretical concept (Bourdieu, 1984; Maguire and Matthews, 2012) and in the coverage of blockbuster movies on Danish cultural pages from 1960 to 2012, this article analyses the changing role of the cultural journalist and the changing cultural approach in cultural journalism since the...

The article argues that, in contemporary journalism, the boundaries between lifestyle journalism and cultural journalism are blurring. The discussions of the article are based in comprehensive empirical studies, more specifically a content analysis of the coverage of lifestyle, culture and consumption in the Danish printed press during the twentiet...

The present article argues that despite the considerable development and expansion of strategic communication as both an academic field and professional practice during the 20th century, strategic communication continues to have an ambiguous status in academia as well as professionally. The article argues for two related explanations of this ambigu...

This article is based on the first content analysis of the coverage of culture, lifestyle and consumption or journalism on culture in the Danish printed press during the twentieth century. It argues that cultural journalism has expanded and developed its focus, interpretation and presentation of culture concurrently with a changing culture and cons...

The present article argues that despite the considerable development and expansion of strategic communication as both an academic field and professional practice during the 20th century, strategic communication continues to have an ambiguous status in academia as well as professionally. The article argues for two related explanations of this ambigu...

This article focuses on the relationship between the media and the state in Denmark before and during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. The media-state relationship in time of crisis and war is central to the discussion of the media's watchdog role in a democratic society. So far, studies of the war in Iraq have focused primarily on the m...

The article focuses on the discussion of spin in the Danish media, especially during the 2005 election campaign, in which spin was a prominent issue amongst journalists. The main argument is that this is not primarily an expression of a professional, self-reflective con- sciousness regarding the shifts in the relationship between the media, soc...

I MedieKultur nr. 38 anmeldte Søren Kjørup Torben Grodals bog Film- oplevelse – en indføring i audiovisuel teori og analyse. Her følger en redigeret version af dels Torben Grodals svar på anmeldelsen og Søren Kjørups replik.

Begreber som spin, medialisering, informations- styring og strategisk kommunikation optræder med jævne mellemrum i den offentlige debat og har lige- ledes i stigende grad præget 1990'ernes internatio- nale medie- og journalistikforskning. Både læg- mandsdebatten og den akademiske diskurs har gerne undertoner af såvel forfald som forførelse. Det sky...

Selvom strategisk kommunikation i dag handler om meget mere end pressemeddelelser og netværk hos journalister på nyhedsredaktionerne, argumenterer artiklen for, at medierne fortsat indtager særlig central position som målgruppe for de initiativer og tiltag, som kom- munikationsbranchens professionelle iværksætter. Artiklen tager afsæt i en undersøg...