Interactivity in news storytelling has introduced possibilities for the audience to be in control of the story. These complex animations come from a convergence of skills and have managed to somewhat displace the boundaries of what journalism is, how it is produced, and how it can be consumed. In this chapter, a historical account of successful and failed media-rich news features will help us understand the hybrid role of interactivity in journalism and how it affects journalistic decision-making, starting with the forgotten technology of electronic paper (e-paper), originally designed for transmission over the digital audio broadcasting network (DAB), and the early development of news apps (news applications) such as ProPublica's Dollars for Docs to the animation used in the long-read format of The New York Times' “Snow Fall” and the development of journalistic crowdsourced data visualizations based on easy-to-use tools such as Swedish SvD's Räntekartan. Furthermore, visualizations in journalism include elements that engage and educate the audience, such as the sensor data-based German WDR animal welfare project Super Cows. While interactivity can soften hard news topics and make the audience stay longer with the content, news stories are protected by traditional norms. Therefore, interactive features are still modest, sometimes surprisingly simple, and normalized to traditional journalism practices.

As data are becoming increasingly central to journalistic practice, a number of technology-driven approaches are emerging among data journalists. This article focuses on sensor journalism, which brings new practical and ethical concerns to journalism. By interviewing and working with data journalists and journalism scholars, we analyze the new technological and ethical challenges that sensors bring to journalism. The results contribute to the knowledge on how data journalists implicitly embed ethical values into their everyday work. Furthermore, they suggest that general ethical values are revisited and extended by the influence of sensors.

This study aims to assess technological determinism in relation tointerdisciplinarity in journalism studies. Based on a scoping reviewof articles published during the last decade in three influentialscientific journals within the journalism studies field, DigitalJournalism, New Media & Society and Journalism, the study analyzesmanifestations of technological determinism and interdisciplinarity.The review includes in its analysis 127 articles published between2012 and 2022 that mention “technological determinism” and “journalism.” Furthermore, the study connects these manifestations tothe biographies of the authors in terms of their PhD dissertationdiscipline. The study raises two concerns. First, the analysis of themanifestation of technological determinism indicates that technological determinism is mainly thought of and discussed by thescholarly community from a functionalist viewpoint. It seems likescholarship that has added nuances and further developed thetheory has been disregarded or perhaps is not even known.Second, interdisciplinary research on technology becomes difficultsince the essence of technological determinism is considered ano-go zone in journalism studies. However, for the field of journalism studies to grow even stronger a revised delimitation isnecessary. To reduce the stigma around technological determinismas a concept, the limitation should not exclude the use of theconcept, but encourage a more nuanced assessment of it to contribute to the discussion of the role of technology in journalism.

In contrast to the majority of European countries, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Swedish authorities did not put the country in lockdown, but mainly presented relatively mild recommendations to work from home and not gather in groups of over 50 persons. Thus, much of the decision-making and restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus had to occur at the organizational level, i.e., within companies. This paper reports the findings from an online survey carried out in June–September 2020 (n = 196), in which Swedish media managers were asked to focus on perceived media leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that Swedish media managers acted with confidence in their remote leadership and engaged in crisis management leader tasks in line with previous crisis management research. While managers learned to appreciate remote work, they stressed the difficulty of being an inspiring leader in a remote setting and the challenge of motivating creativity, one of the most important components in managing journalism and media work.

How issues are framed in journalism in terms of problems, solutions, and levels of responsibility is of great importance in order to engage and lead toward individual and collective action. Data journalism has been acknowledged as a practice that often features a high level of interactivity, with the potential to engage the public. In this study, we investigate the content and production of climate change reporting in Swedish public service data journalism and discuss how frames are used in this alternative form of moderated science communication. Our results indicate an unconventional merger between science communication and data journalistic practices where motivational framing is used only to some extent as a way to increase public engagement with climate change. We also found that producers focus on educating and raising awareness rather than engaging the public and that they are guided by the ideal of objectivity.

Over the past decade, data journalism has received considerable attention among scholars, pointing to novel forms of investigative reporting as well as new daily practices of news production. This study contributes to existing scholarship by conceptualizing data journalism through distinctions between hard and soft news in relation to service journalism. We analyze news produced by specialized data desks in Swedish public service organizations over a 5-year period (2015?2019) and propose a model for how service journalism attributes can be used as a bridge between the binary categories of hard and soft in data journalism. With this model, we point to how data journalism in public service organizations challenges established notions of soft and hard news and how hybrid production practices open up new research trajectories concerning the societal significance of news in the digital age.

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.