Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the value of PSM. The paper draws upon an exploratory comparative study of focus group discussions conducted with young adults in Sweden and Estonia. The findings show that while participants in both countries rarely use PSM as part of their routine media consumption, they nonetheless attribute significant societal relevance and value to these media. They consistently associate PSM with decommodification, trustworthiness, education, inclusion, accessibility, and national continuity, often defining these values explicitly in contrast to commercial and social media platforms. They were also associated with childhood memories and family rituals. Although these themes were common across the two national contexts, there were differences pertaining to their history and sociopolitical context. We conclude that limited use of PSM among young people does not necessarily signal a lack of recognition of their public value. © The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Recent global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and migration streams, have highlighted the promise of digital infrastructures while also showcasing how dependent we are on digital systems for accessing welfare services such as healthcare, social services and education, as well as for accessing public service media. Notably, in the context of welfare provision, different people and social groups are affected in distinct ways by such digital systems. This Crosscurrent contribution conceptualizes the notion of digital vulnerabilities, which captures some of the contemporary challenges posed to societies increasingly interconnected with and dependent on digital systems. Drawing on feminist moral philosophy, we suggest three layers of digital vulnerabilities: vulnerabilities through digital infrastructures, vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures and vulnerabilities of digital infrastructures. We illustrate these three layers with examples from four critical welfare domains, namely healthcare, education, social services and public service media. We conclude with a call for additional empirical research on how digital vulnerabilities play out in practice, across welfare domains and in welfare regimes beyond the Global North. Such issues need to be explored further to meet contemporary challenges.

This article introduces the concept of expressive distrust to address persistent puzzles in media trust research. Drawing on a qualitative interview study with Swedish audience members who publicly criticize news media, we argue that distrust is not only an attitudinal stance but also a performative practice shaped by identity, group belonging, and political strategy. Expressive distrust refers to signals of distrust that serve purposes beyond evaluating media performance - such as signaling cognitive virtue, reinforcing social ties, or influencing public discourse. Our findings show that individuals often articulate nuanced views of journalism privately while performing categorical distrust in public, leveraging it as symbolic capital and a tool for political contestation. Conceptually, this challenges linear models of trust/distrust and calls for incorporating performative dimensions into existing typologies. Recognizing expressive distrust is crucial for fully understanding the so-called crisis of trust.

Public service-medierna (PSM) befinner sig i en tid av förändring – politiskt, tekniskt och publikmässigt. Men vad vet vi egentligen om dem?

Denna rapport ger en bred internationell översikt över forskningenom public service-medier mellan 1998 och 2024. Genom en analys av 275 vetenskapliga artiklar kartläggs hur forskningen vuxit fram, vilka frågor som dominerat – och vilka kunskapsluckor som ännu återstår.

Rapporten vänder sig till forskare, studenter, journalister, beslutsfattare och alla som vill förstå public service-mediernas roll i ett föränderligt medielandskap. Med tydliga slutsatser och rekommendationer pekar den också framåt: vilka frågor måste framtida forskning ta sig an för att möta kunskapsbehoven i en tid av politisk polarisering och global medieomvandling?

Amanda Ramsälv är fil. dr och biträdande forskare på JMG vid Göteborgs universitet. Hennes forskning kretsar kring journalistiskt arbete och digital nyhetsproduktion.

Public service media (PSM) are undergoing a period of change – politically, technologically, and in terms of their audience. But what do we really know about them?

This report provides a broad international overview of research on public service media between 1998 and 2024. Analyzing 275 scientific articles, it maps how research has evolved, which topics have dominated in research – and which knowledge gaps remain.

The report is aimed at researchers, students, journalists, decision-makers, and anyone who wants to understand the role of public service media in a changing media landscape. With clear conclusions and recommendations, it also points the way forward: what issues must future research address in order to meet the needfor knowledge in an era of political polarisation and global media transformation?

Amanda Ramsälv (PhD) is a researcher at JMG at the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on journalism and digital news production.

Although it has been said for some decades that printed newspapers are dying, they are still in existence; however, Swedish newspapers have entered a new era. Throughout the country, the distribution of printed newspapers is slowly ceasing. In this article, we trace the process of the disappearance of printed news through ethnographic field work engaging with the perspectives of the newspaper industry, readers, and civil society. Conceptualizing the disappearance of printed news as an assemblage of imaginaries, materialities, and practices, we are interested in how this disappearance is accomplished, motivated, interpreted, and experienced. The article makes an argument for exploring disappearance in tandem with emergence to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary media culture and society.

While studies of media trust that rely on survey data and statistical analysis give us valuable information, there is some uncertainty about what exactly is being measured with these study designs. There is a need for more inductive and qualitative studies that can help us develop our understanding of the concept and phenomena of trust as such. In this article, we present an analysis of a qualitative interview study (N = 97) with open-ended questions of trust. The results suggest that, although there are many ways to interpret this question, only some lead people to evaluate what researchers usually associate with media trust. Instead, informants saw trust as an "impossible" question; they saw it as an opportunity to communicate a standpoint express identity and emotion or casts the trust-question as an issue of knowledge and rationality. We consider that the results from this study illustrate some of the difficulties that need to be overcome in order to advance the research on media trust.

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on distrust towards news media and journalism, a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to declining institutional trust and the rise of political disinformation. We analyse existing literature focusing on how media distrust has been studied and conceptualised, its explanations, and its consequences. We highlight the conceptual diversity and methodological plurality in the field, noting the varied definitions and operationalisations of distrust, as well as the dominance of quantitative approaches alongside significant qualitative contributions. The complex relationship between distrust in the media and democracy is also explored, revealing conflicting evidence on whether distrust leads to news avoidance and reduced political engagement or fosters critical media consumption and political engagement. The review underscores the need for clearer definitions and typologies of distrust, supplementing dichotomous operationalisations of trust/distrust with ones that capture distrust as a multidimensional phenomenon, with each dimension having different antecedents and consequences.