The cultural magazine Kobra (2001-2017) was one of the longest running shows in Swedish public service television history. Kobra defined culture broadly as arts, popular culture and subcultures, both international and Swedish. The study uses three lenses-journalistification, transnationality and cultural/societal criticism-to analyze how Kobra evolved over its long run. It focuses on four globally eventful years 2001, 2005, 2011, and 2016 and shows how the shifting SVT mandate is reflected in the show's title sequences, program structure, visual features, and text. Transnationality becomes established through topic themed episodes connecting various cultural domains in different parts of the world or through country/city-themed episodes. A close reading from three different years reveals that Kobra exercised transnational systemic criticism through the choice of theme and interview subjects, rather than through evaluation of cultural expression, in line with its increasing journalistification and public service mandate.

Hur ser världen ut när den betraktas genom ett kulturellt filter? Hur bidrar kulturjournalistiken till förståelsen av brännande samtidshändelser och samhällsfrågor? Är kulturjournalisternas oro för kritikens överlevnad i det digitala medielandskapet befogad?

I denna bok undersöker tre medieforskare kulturjournalistikens utveckling sedan 1980-talet med särskilt fokus på omvärldsbilder och politiska dimensioner. Författarna kartlägger innehåll i tidningar, radio och tv och intervjuar kulturjournalister. De diskuterar de sociala mediernas betydelse och belyser svenskarnas intresse för kulturjournalistik.

Det visar sig att kulturjournalistiken har ett unikt anslag jämfört med traditionell nyhetsjournalistik och politisk opinionsbildning. Den rör sig gärna bortom nationalstatliga förståelseramar och är debattdrivande på ett särpräglat sätt. Laddade kulturdebatter om #metoo, terrorism och identitetspolitik breder ut sig och lockar till klick. Samtidigt har recensionsgenren fortfarande en given roll i utbudet, även om den befinner sig i klicklandskapets utkanter.

Boken ger en unik inblick i en sällan belyst del av det svenska medielandskapet, och tillför ny kunskap om kulturjournalistikens särskilda stildrag samt de roller den spelar i samhället och demokratin.

The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, with a particular focus on transformations in genres, text types and thematic repertoires. Drawing on a constructed week sample from press, television and radio during four decades (1985, 1995, 2005, 2015), we address three aspects of 'the crisis discourse' of cultural journalism: (1) the potential decline in cultural coverage due to economic cutbacks and downsized cultural desks; (2) cultural journalism's perceived 'quality crisis' connected to transformations of thematic repertoires; and (3) the alleged decline of cultural expertise related to changes in cultural journalism's generic structures. The study makes a unique contribution to cultural journalism scholarship by identifying media-specific differences and complementary relationships between media forms, building on media ecology and genre theory. In contrast to the crisis discourse, results show that cultural journalism has expanded significantly through popularization and thematic and generic diversification, but the transformations are different in press, radio and television due to differing role positions in the larger media ecosystem. In addition, some parts of the cultural journalism media ecology appear to be endangered.

This article investigates the way Swedish cultural journalists from press, radio and television perceive the core and boundaries of their sub-field at a time when digitalisation and “journalistification” blur them even more. It draws on 27 in-depth interviews with cultural journalists that have worked in the field since the 1980s. What is defined as cultural journalism has expanded since the inclusion of popular culture in its mandate in the early 1990s. Despite this, cultural journalists at different media share similar understandings of their remit, even if self-identification with current practices varies somewhat by generation. The study shows how cultural journalists defend and negotiate the boundaries towards debate and opinion, and news and entertainment journalism. Cultural journalists experience pressure by management to be relevant, newsworthy and “clickable”. Especially press respondents felt that cultural debates have become increasingly indistinguishable from societal debates, due to their visibility in the digital flow. How cultural journalists negotiate boundaries with entertainment and news desks varies somewhat depending on the media organisation. Boundary challenges appear through new genres related to liveness, personality-orientation and societal debate, all of which may conflict with the central task of cultural journalism—to provide in-depth reflection and expertise-based analysis.

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's distinctiveness. On the one hand, we see a broadening, diversification and newsification of cultural journalism, making the beat more like other parts of the news organization. On the other hand, traits from cultural journalism, such as analysis, interpretation, and subjectivity as well as a broader sociocultural interest, are seeping into other parts of journalism. Three main research questions guide our approach to pointing out these areas of tension: (1) What are the implications of the broadening of the notion of culture in cultural journalism? (2) What have the changes in the organization of news work and professional roles meant for cultural journalism practitioners? (3) What is the particular epistemology of cultural journalism today? By rereading existing cultural journalism scholarship through the lens of the tensions and paradoxes currently characterizing the subfield, we bring out structural similarities and differences that nuance the crisis narrative, which has influenced much recent literature.

Sedan tidigt åttiotal, när Sven-Olov Wallenstein slog ner i Stockholms intellektuella liv, har han vuxit till en kraftfull och mångförgrenad institution i sig, under sitt kärnfulla emblem: Walle. Med avstamp i filosofin och idéhistorien har han gripit in i den estetiska debatten som ingen annan under dessa gångna fyra decennier. Genom egna böcker och genom översättningar, genom tidskrifter, recensioner, katalogtexter, och inte minst genom sin undervisning runtom i Sverige och Norden har han på djupet påverkat diskussionen inom konst, arkitektur, men även inom litteratur, dans, musik och film. Som uttolkare och översättare av den klassiska tyska filosofin – Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger och Adorno – liksom av dess moderna franska arvtagare – Derrida, Foucault och Deleuze – har han på ett avgörande sätt bidragit till att återknyta det band mellan svensk och europeisk idékultur som den föregående generationens ofta historielösa omfamning av angloamerikansk analytisk filosofi hade klippt av.

För att fira Walle har vi satt ihop en bok. Det har inte blivit en pliktbok, ingen sedvanlig samling lärda uppsatser som följer vänbokens konventioner. Istället för en festskrift, fick det bli en skriftfest, en bild- och uttrycks-fest, där skrivande och skapandet självt firas. Walle har arbetat hårdare än de flesta, men till sist var det alltid festen som var målet, releasen, partyt, skrattet och galenskapen. Vad vore en filosof som inte skrattar? Inte en Walle, inte den som förmår förvandla tunga resonemang till klara linjer, komplexa relationer till glad geometri, och mångfaldiga ord till färgstarka, träffande och koncentrerade bilder.

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 journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects internal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; (2) Nordic cultural journalists position themselves positively toward the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; (3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes toward popular culture phenomena such as TV series.

Cultural and entertainment journalism deals with aesthetic experiences, advice on cultural consumption, as well as reflection and debate on ethical and moral humanistic issues. Does this sub-field of journalism systematically represent immigrants and integration differently than the other news and commentary articles? Comparing immigration discourse in a representative sample of six Scandinavian newspapers between 1970 and 2016 using content analysis we find that cultural journalism, while clearly reverbing with the dominant national issues at the time, did provide alternative perspectives. It not only brought up themes like racism, multiculturalism, national identity and religion more often, but was also more positive, more gender-balanced and more often gave a voice to immigrants than other news did. A closer qualitative reading further suggests a typology of ten main story-types, varying relatively little over time and across national borders. Cultural journalism in this case illustrates how the cultural public sphere can positively contribute to the debate of complicated issues in the public sphere by offering resources for identification, empathy and arguments for specific points of view.

Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive, focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to cultural elites. The cultural filter put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing journalistification of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.