Based on a mixed-method approach, this article aims at exploring the specialized forms of interviewing that are used as resources in television broadcast news production. Interviews are analyzed as functionally specialized forms of interaction (cf. Heritage, 1985) with various functions in different phases of the news production. We assume that interviews are organized and carried out as communicative activities oriented towards specific tasks, identities and contexts of interaction. In contrast to established definitions of the archetypical on air news interview, we argue that broadcast interviewing is only partially produced for an “overhearing audience” (ibid.). Taking into account the entire process of producing and presenting news, journalism harbours a multitude of interviewing practices and activities which remain invisible if only the taped and transcribed broadcast talk is analyzed. Our study clearly indicates that news interviews contain more diversified and hybrid activities of communication than has been described in previous research.
The overall aim of this study is to examine how journalistic expert identities are constructed and displayed in the context of intraprofessional journalist-to-journalist interviews on live television news. Previous research has, in detail, explored how journalists orient to the identity of a critical and impartial interrogator, especially in political news interviews. By focusing on journalistic expert identities, this article contributes to a wider perspective on the multiple and changing identities performed in contemporary journalism. The overall argument is that the expert identity is enabled and promoted in collaborative activities on different levels of discourse such as: (i) the media format, (ii) the question–answer based organization of the interaction, (iii) the orientation to liveness, and (iv) how knowledgeability and epistemic stance are constructed and displayed in the actual design of questions and answers. The data consist of interviews from the prime-time news program Aktuellt, broadcast on Swedish public service television in 2008 and 2009.
Paketerad politik - 11 essäer om journalistik och medier får läsaren/medborgaren att inse hur ömsesidiga relationerna är mellan medier och politik - idag, men också historiskt. Politiken och journalistiken är beroende av varandra. De är åtskilda, men förenade - politikerna använder medierna och vice versa. Mediernas förändringar vad gäller bl.a. teknik innebär också nya villkor för relationen politik-medier. Behovet av en "mediekritisk kompetens" blir allt större. Det mediegenomsyrade samhället kräver att vi alla kan tänka och reflektera kritiskt över de villkor medierna erbjuder för det offentliga samtalet. Till detta vill denna bok bidraga.
Whenever a major event flares up in the world, we are bound to be met by correspondents reporting live on the news. The correspondents are typically promoted as authoritative voices. Their live talk is delivered in “the live two-way,” a broadcast interaction between the presenter and the correspondent on location. Focusing on live reporting during the Ukraine–Russia war (2022–), this study analyses the communicative work that goes on in the live two-way, and how correspondents handle the tasks related to the enactments of epistemic authority. A conceptual framework is applied defining the communicative and epistemic dimension of the live two-way. This study applies a discourse approach and focuses on experienced correspondents in Swedish public service. Data consists of 30 live two-ways and interviews with 5 of the journalists about planning and execution of the live reporting. Results show how practices and roles separated in other genres of news are integrated in the complex work of the correspondent who is expected to fluently report from location, convey a sense of being there, present facts, and analyse and explain. This study indicates different styles of reporting when correspondents alternate between a careful and confident stance as they balance their commitments to truth.
This paper explores how web TV productions and journalists’ use of social media change how journalistic formats are being ”done” in terms of both form and content. Illustrating our argument with examples from recent studies of web TV productions, journalistic digital guidelines, and industry interviews, we suggest that “backstage informality” is both a prominent audience orientation in online productions, as well as an overarching characteristic of web TV journalism. Web TV productions expose backstage settings and practices, and journalists construct sociable relations with audiences by performing as if being mates with audiences in talk and interaction. This creates an image of audiences’ accessing the real, unmediated personas of journalists, as well as the real conditions of journalistic productions. We see this orientation to backstage informality as part of the current development of trying to understand audiences’ preferences and expectations in online media contexts.
This article deals with the organization of off-camera interactions between journalists and politicians. What kinds of talk transpire between the participants before and after the broadcast interview? What functions do the before and after interview interaction seem to have? What social norms and conventions seem to influence the character of the pre-interview and post-interview discourse? How are their respective professional roles negotiated in these settings? The framing of the interview as an object of study in its production context aims to contribute to existing research on the news interview, specifically within Conversation Analysis (e.g. Clayman and Heritage 2002), which has not studied processes of production, but has mostly restricted itself to analyses of that which is broadcast to the audience.
This article presents a close analysis of interactions in cross-media formats with a specific focus on how television ‘is done’ on the web by established sports broadcasters who are used to producing traditional sports television. It will be argued that the web platform promotes significantly altered audience-oriented behaviours compared to traditional television, and that the web ultimately both calls for and produces a new kind of sociability in relation to audiences. It will be proposed in the discussion that this new kind of sociability will have an increasing impact also on how traditional television ‘is done’. The article makes use of data from the sports genre that is normally associated with ‘lighter entertainment’. Therefore the results may not be immediately applicable to how other types of journalistic genres tackle the communicative challenges of new media. However, it will be argued that sports journalism may well be thought of as a frontrunner when it comes to adapting to increasingly ‘sociable’ communicative modes of address. The analysis of web interactions focuses around three overarching audience orientations that are promoted in the web context: superliveness, metadiscourse and complex audience orientation(s). Taken together, these orientations constitute ‘a new kind of sociability’.
Journalists engaged in dialogues between themselves on air have become a common feature on the news. The main purpose of this study is to identify the various ways that these ‘intraprofessional dialogues’ are used and performed on the news with a specific focus on examples from television. Besides identifying the different uses of intraprofessional dialogues, an extend ed example of a studio talk between a presenter and a political correspondent serves to problematise the distinction between the discourse of news presentation and report on the one hand, and the discourse in these kinds of intraprofessional talks on the other hand, made by Montgomery (2007, 2008). The qualitative data is drawn from a corpus of codings of news and current affairs programming from Great Britain and Sweden totalling approximately 150 hours including radio and television, commercial and public service channels. The quantitative findings that accompany the qualitative analysis show that journalists-as interviewees in news and current affairs broadcasts are even more common than politicians-as-interviewees. This raises interesting questions about the execution of political accountability in contemporary news journalism.
By combining ethnographic methods with textual analysis, this article sets out to answer the question how a scripted event on live television is infused with a sense of ‘liveness’ in order to balance the requirements of control and spontaneity in a broadcast interview. The management of this seemingly paradoxical desire is, in this analysis, linked to the ways in which professionals work at maintaining the identity of public service while competing on a commercial media market. In relation to this general inquiry, the script’s status in the production of a broadcast interview will also be analyzed, an area which is somewhat of a blind spot in media research. In doing so, the conventional division between scripted and unscripted broadcast talk (Scannell 2003) is called into question.
This study aims at understanding how politicians of both genders who are constantly in the media relate to, and manage, their mediated visibility. I assume that politicians who are constantly subject to visual exposure need to manage their experienced lack of control by developing various strategies in order to feel more empowered than perhaps is possible given the media's power of framing their political personas. Six Swedish politicians in prominent positions were interviewed qualitatively using open-ended questions relating to their views on press photographers, the role of visuals and personal experiences of being visualised in the press. It was found that the politicians develop both manifest counter-strategies as well as more latent, reflexive ones which all imply an unwillingness to submit to the media's visual framing power.
This paper examines a news genre that is designed for the enactment of interpretive journalism: the live studio correspondent commentary on Swedish news. We trace how the role of expert commentator/interpreter of events has evolved during a 30-year period with a focus on the relation between interaction and surrounding context. How is the expert interpreter role multimodally achieved, and how do technologies enable or constrain the enactment of an expert identity in these dialogues? As we discuss our results, also basing our argument on other studies of the same interactional phenomena, we will propose that the existence of this particular news format can be related to an ongoing power struggle between journalists and politicians. We see these interactions as providing journalism with a perhaps yet underestimated powerful resource in the framing of news, and argue that they should not be written off as merely supplying lightweight, gossipy comments about politics in a glossy studio environment.
This study focuses on how interviewees’ utterances are used as resources in news production processes. We examine how these communicative units, here labelled ‘interview bites’, are integrated in every major aspect of the news production process as well as in the presentation of news reports. Basically, we argue that an interview bite operates in three distinct ways, as (a) a format, (b) a mental representation, and (c) an artefact. Although we claim that it has these different functions, the three dimensions interact and collectively work as powerful motivations for the choices made by reporters throughout the news production process. The data is gathered from field observations of Swedish reporters’ work at a major news desk and from in-depth reporter interviews. Theoretically, the study re-visits Clayman’s (1995) considerations for enhancing quotability: narrative relevance, conspicuousness and extractability. While maintaining these three basic cornerstones of what makes certain statements quote-worthy, a re-definition of the rationale behind each consideration is needed in order to make them relevant for our understanding of everyday news production practices.
In this article, we present an analysis of how gendering is “being done” in press visuals of women in politics. In short, we will argue that women professionals working within the area of politics are gendered and type-cast in more complex ways than previous research has yet shown. In a qualitative analysis of visuals from three different political scandals in Sweden involving prominent political women, we analyse the diversified ways of portraying women in visuals that do not simply reproduce the idea that the gendering of women uncritically correlates with concepts like sexualization, objectification, passivity and otherness. As on-lookers of a professional woman in politics caught in a pressing situation in a photograph, we will argue that at times we may be invited to see her as both an Other and a person with whom we can identify ourselves with. Or a woman may be positioned as an object with a focus on appearance, but not by emphasizing her femininity and sexuality but by doing exactly the reverse. We will also discuss the complexity that is related to the various contextual factors that come into play when press photographers and editors communicatively “work” at accomplishing specific gendered visual “preferred readings”.
The direct-to-camera shot of a person speaking on TV is seen as fundamental for the shaping of an intimate “me”-relationship with the viewer (Scannell 2010). However, in live talks between newscasters and in-house correspondents, as in other formats, the participants look at each other and not the viewer. We ask what this visual look-transition means when it comes to audience address. By examining three examples from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, we focus on the visual representation of the broadcaster’s look and how it has gradually changed over time. Our results show that viewer relations and trust is established using a range of interactional tools beyond the look-to-camera. Audience address shifts over time from an “I see you-relation” to a “look-at-us” relation requiring another kind of performance by the represented participants, as well as another kind of relation between broadcaster and viewer.
This paper deals with the phenomenon commonly labelled political scandal (Thompson 1995, 2000). Our study of three political scandals in the print media, where a general framework of discourse analysis has been applied, is concerned with aspects of media, gender, power and celebrity. Main areas of interest are the journalistic use of visual techniques, and given that press photographers and photo editors in general are men, what actions and situations are seen as interesting to put forward in the visualization of male and female politicians? We will show how journalists, using visuals, actively re-use previous knowledge, experience and assumptions based on prior scandals when the discursive frame or image of a politician is constructed in a new scandal. This seems to be even more true when the politician in question is a woman, possibly because women are used more actively in the construction of an emotional scandal narrative. We also believe that we have found significant gender-based differences in the visual construction of male and female politicians respectively which will be further exemplified in the paper. Lastly, we argue that gender-bias in a political scandal is not only linked to traditional conceptions and stereotypical notions of ‘men’ and ‘women’, but can be defined and constructed in various ways depending on each politician’s media biography.
New technologies offer new interactional possibilities for news journalism, but they also pose a challenge to broadcasters who are accustomed to the practices of ‘old’ television news. The web is one such arena where broadcasters are in the process of mastering a sense of sociability (Scannell 1996, 2010) and ‘communicative ease’ (cf. Hutchby, 2006) in relation to audiences. They struggle to find ways to engage audiences in the roles of both viewers and users in line with the technological affordances of the web. Rather little attention has yet been paid to how the general sociability of broadcasting is influenced by the development of digital media. This study presents a case of how broadcasters orient to their audience(s) in a so-called live news co-production on the web. The main point is to highlight both possibilities and dilemmas in the management of audience-oriented activities on a new technological platform with its different conditions for production and reception. We argue that broadcasters interested in producing web news both need to adhere to the professional principles and standards of ordinary broadcasting, and at the same time show that they are competent enough to also produce unpolished, layman-like material normally associated with unprofessionality.
In this article, we quantitatively establish the centrality and importance of interviews in news and current affairs broadcasts. We show how segments of interviews (from soundbites to longer recorded or live question-and-answer interactions) are deployed as communicative resources in the construction and presentation of news in various ways. The data allows for a cross-national comparison in between the UK and Sweden that point to differences in practice between the countries. We argue that our findings may be used to critically examine various conceptualisations of broadcast interviews in general and political interviews in particular. We also show how journalists outnumber politicians as interviewees in the news, a finding that is in need of further exploration from a range of perspectives We also believe that our study provides solid ground on which to base future critical studies of the authority of journalism, dialogical and soundbite journalism, and the alleged fragmentisation of news.
This paper presents a case study of a contemporary Swedish gambling ad video from Svenska Spel published on YouTube. The study applies critical multimodal analysis to examine with what communicative strategies the state-owned operator positions itself on the soon-to-be de-regulated Swedish gambling market. The focus in the analysis lies on the linguistic and visual choices used to achieve certain communicative goals in relation to the consumer. The results show that nationalistic and patriotic values are conveyed and used in order to connect to an implied male consumer who is both ‘Swedish’ and of multi-ethnic origin; the latter being positioned as an Other in need of being taught about the Swedish values of fairness, trustworthiness and authenticity. Deleted from the advertisement is anything having to do with gambling as a social practice. Svenska Spel's identity is visually and linguistically converted from that of a gambling company into a philanthropist whose business quite unproblematically gain society and its “Swedish” people. The study raises questions regarding demands for “moderate” gambling advertisements, and suggests that current moderation regulations miss the mark when it comes to identifying and regulating problematic ideological content in seemingly inconspicuously designed gambling advertising.
This study brings together an interest in contemporary gambling advertising, national regulatory impacts on such advertising, and the ways in which gender, in combination with ethnicity, operate in such advertising. The paper’s aim is to explore the interplay between state and self-regulations of gambling advertising and the concrete design of these advertisements in Sweden. More to the point, it explores how the “moderation” regulation in the Swedish Gambling Act (from 2019), as well as industry principles of non-stereotypical gender advertising, impact on the ways in which gambling ads are multimodally designed and organized. The results show that women are explicitly targeted by using both masculine and feminine semiotic strategies, albeit in a “moderate” way. The male market is addressed using stereotypically masculine framings, but without aggressively masculine or macho-like codes. The analysis further exposes that current regulations only partly cover other potential problems in ad design such as ethnic stereotyping. It is argued that the law’s demand for moderation in advertising may backfire as a strategy to protect people from the harmful effects of gambling. This because it promotes moderate narratives and moderate gender representations that mimic ordinary practices, settings and lifestyles that appear highly normalised (and thus risk-free).
This article presents a case study of a series of Swedish football commentary webcastswhere both producers and users engage in communication with each other duringthe FIFA World Cup in 2014. The main aim is to identify what the participants doto construct sociable bonds with each other using the technological affordancesavailable, specifically those connected to second screens. Second screening isapproached as a thoroughly sociable activity rather than a practice you engage in forprimarily instrumental reasons like finding facts or statistics. The analysis shows howusers and producers adopt strategies of inclusion oriented to creating a joint senseof “being here together” in the community that is formed around the official hashtagexpressenvm. The results indicate that second screen setups of this kind have thepotential of displacing the big TV screen and its live sports event, at least for a specificuser crowd.
This article examines how five bakeries in a mid-sized Swedish town communicate with their (potential) customers using different forms of ‘authentic’ displays of the much-loved seasonal pastry, the semla (a particular type of Lenten bun). Authenticity is understood as strategies of communicating with potential customers and passers-by in ways that make them feel included in a successful, sociable relationship with the bakery in question (see Scannell’s, 2001, article, ‘Authenticity and experience’). Specifically, various semla artefacts are used in the shop window/entrance as strategies to ‘talk to and interact with’ passers-by. However, these semla displays are not recognized as advertising by the bakers themselves. While previous research on authenticity, food discourse and ideology have identified traditional, natural and elite authenticityas expressed in relation to specific social groups, this study shows how authenticity may harbour oppositional values and seemingly incoherent ways of addressing customers in relation to such questions as power, eliteness and class. One explanation for these more subtly distinctive authenticity performances may be found in Swedish culture which has less social class distinction. This may, in turn, mean that certain establishments and products may not be as prominently class imprinted as others when it comes to how they address customers. Such a culture may create a more blended range of authenticity expressions.
This paper qualitatively examines a Swedish case where a TV broadcaster takes it upon itself to confront discriminatory practices in sports by addressing issues of segregation and racism in relation to the practice of cross-country skiing in a seven-part series called Stephan, Gliding. It is argued that racism and segregation are addressed through processes of cozification of both form and content. This means that the producers use semiotic resources and strategies of narration that strip the subject matter of any threatening and confrontative components, and instead embed it within a cosy story frame that will not alienate those watching. At a denotative level, Stephan, Gliding tells the story of a beginner who takes on the challenge of skiing in the 90-kilometre cross-country ski competition The Vasa Race. On an ideological level, the programme can be read critically as the narrative of a foreigner deciding to undertake the mission of his own integration into Swedish society by ways of learning to ski. It is argued that the existence of these simultaneous, competing discourses may be a better strategy to maintain a successful “communicative relationship” with audiences than to not address the topic at all.
Gambling advertising’s use of celebrities, humor, and representations of happy people who Win Big, in narratives told in brash colored, high-pitched ads, are argued to increase the risk for gambling problems, or worse, addiction. Online casino ads have been subject to particular legislative attention partly for these reasons, as well as for being increasingly targeted to women who, by some, are judged to be especially vulnerable to such marketing. This paper presents a context-attentive, multimodal discourse analysis of a Swedish online casino brand’s advertising videos from 2014-2022. The study illustrates how general statements regarding risk in relation to (online casino) gambling ads’ content dramatically reduces their potential cultural significance to audiences. It is argued that one should, to a greater extent, treat these adverts as complex and socio-culturally rooted texts whose content may not so easily be written off as simply “risky,” to women or otherwise.
The production of political talk is changing in response to ongoing changes in the overall media ecology. The rise of web TV challenges the previously dominant mediated politics of traditional broadcasting. In this paper we examine the practices of the mediatization of politics in the web TV environment via a humorous encounter between a self-declared “prankster” posing as a web TV broadcaster, and several Swedish politicians. The discussion reflects on various data emanating from this encounter to reveal how Web TV challenges traditional broadcasting norms, and offers fresh challenges for politicians who are continuously adapting to new media logics for exposure.
This article provides an updated analysis relating to John B. Thompson’s argument about political visibility and fragility. It does so in light of recent years’ development of communication technologies and the proliferation of nonbroadcasting media organizations producing TV. Instances of a new mediated encounter for politicians is analyzed in detail – the live web interview – produced and streamed by two Swedish tabloids during election campaigning 2014. It is argued that the live web interview is not yet a recognizable ‘communicative activity type’ with an obvious set of norms, rules, and routines. This fact makes politicians more intensely exposed to moments of mediated fragility which may be difficult to control. The most crucial condition that changes how politicians are able to manage their visibility is the constantly rolling ‘non-exclusive’ live camera which does not give the politician any room for error. The tabloids do not seem to mind ‘things going a bit wrong’ while airing; rather, interactional flaws are argued to be part and parcel of the overall web TV performance.
During the Swedish General Election in September 2014, the web exploded as a crucial communication platform for politicians. Especially non-broadcasters such as tabloids went all in to produce a multitude of various formats where politicians got to be confronted with questions on a wide range of issues. The web platform clearly gives rise to ‘new’ or at least other ways of interacting with politicians than what has been previously offered in traditional broadcasting. In this paper, we will present an overview of the various formats used, and also particularly focus on a number of communicative practices that we argue are particularly promoted in, and by, the web context.
This paper examines the impact of the digital transformation on broadcast practices from a producer/studio participant perspective with a focus on sports journalism online. More specifically, the study targets changes in sports talk and interaction as producers re-shape their communicative activities to fit audiences’ new contexts of reception. It discusses how these changes in practices relate to some of the fundamental assumptions in current broadcast talk theory. The textual studies are complemented by interviews with six prominent Swedish media industry representatives in order to shed light on their perceptions of the broadcast to online shift given their respective experiences. The results show how producers/participants adapt to a more casual and relaxed interactional style and tone online than in ordinary broadcasting. The studied sportscasts also largely abandon the traditional broadcast address, as expressed in direct discursive address and looks-to-camera, for an orientation to screen devices where social media active audiences are to be “found,” although still having a traditionally positioned audience to attend to. Although sociability is still the structural principle for producers’ interactional choices irrelevant of platform, the strategies of how to achieve it are changing due to the digital transformation.
Spelreklam uppfattas som ett kontroversiellt ämne. Det beror på att spelreklam antas kunna förvärra människors problemspelande. Forskningen kan dock bara i mycket begränsad omfattning påvisa en sådan relation. Resultaten som presenteras i det här kapitlet visar att det finns en stark opinion för att förbjuda reklam för nätcasinospel i Sverige. De demonstrerar även att det finns ett samband mellan en vilja att förbjuda sådan reklam och negativa attityder till spelreklam i allmänhet. Resultaten i kapitlet tydliggör även att bakgrundsfaktorer som klass eller eget spelande inte inverkar på om man stöder förbudet för nätcasinoreklam eller inte. Vi menar att det finns anled-ning att tro att våra attityder till spelreklam i allmänhet och nätcasinospel i synnerhet påverkas av den strida strömmen av spelreklam under senare år, liksom av den starkt negativa debatten om spelreklam och nätkasinoreklam som drivits på från politiskt håll.
This article explores viewers’ experiences of the Swedish Public Service (SVT) ‘slow TV’ broadcast Den stora älgvandringen (The Great Moose Migration), aired as a three-week long, live, multi-platform programme since 2019. Through semi-structured interviews with key informants, the aim is to qualitatively under- stand the audience attraction to the 24/7 programme, especially when it comes to authenticity, affordances and its apparent slowness of pace. The study showcases a spectrum of audiences’ experiences, ranging from appreciating the programme’s serenity and stillness to its potential for unexpected drama. It is suggested thatThe Great Moose Migration offers a ‘direct’ link to Swedish nature as it enables awallowing in Swedish landscapes and fauna, and allows for an unashamed adora- tion of the majestic Swedish moose, but without it being experienced as something particularly ‘Swedish’. It is found that authenticity is central to the programme’s success with both production team and audiences. However, both personal and sociable experiences of the programme as authentic rest on the collective accept- ance of authenticity as something intrinsically produced by people and technolo- gies yet not experienced as constructed. Rather, it is something that hovers in between experienced mediated and unmediated reality.
Our primary aim in this paper is to argue for a discourse analytical take on questions of how risk and safety are managed by personnel in high-risk workplaces, with a special focus on constructions of “us” and “them”. Thus, we approach the same issue investigated in many other studies, i.e., diverging safety-related understandings between people representing various occupational groups. We choose to examine so-called communication gaps as they are “talked into being” in discourse, meaning that we treat them as primarily socially constructed. A case analysis based on interviews will be used to illustrate how we can understand this phenomenon from a communicative perspective inspired by Linell’s (1998a) dialogue theory. While previous discourse and safety culture research emphasizes broad patterns and differences between entire professions and departments, we argue that researchers should hesitate to reinforce the notion of homogeneous groups. Instead, there is great value in demonstrating collective social construction processes and commonalities so as to facilitate inter-group solidarity and possibly productive change.