Engaging Citizens for Climate Change—Challenges for Journalism

Abstract

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.

Climate irresponsibility on social media. A critical approach to “high-carbon visibility discourse”

“…Boykoff 2012) and various journalistic materials contribute to or detract from the public understanding of the issue (e.g. Berglez 2011;Appelgren and Jönsson 2020). As society's media ecology is increasingly associated with social media platforms (Anderson 2014), more and more scholars have turned their attention to the role of such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, Weibo and Instagram.…”

The intersection between elected representatives and threatened species recovery

“…Accountability institutions such as digital-native (e.g., social) and legacy media (e.g., print media) offer a means to reach constituency members and promote change to elected representatives (Hackett et al, 2017). By embracing efforts deployed in other disciplines such as public health and climate change in building public support and awareness (Appelgren & Jönsson, 2021;Ting et al, 2020), the conservation community could use data like that provided here to raise awareness of the plight of threatened species. Furthermore, the actions of a motivated representative to adopt the biodiversity crisis as a priority could encourage other less motivated and ideologically alike colleagues to adopt a similar approach by means of social contagion (Ognyanova, 2022).…”

A softer kind of hard news? Data journalism and the digital renewal of public service news in Sweden

“…Furthermore, while the two data desks were testing new digital formats, other studies of these desks show that they rarely consulted audience studies and almost never collected metrics (Appelgren et al, 2012). To emphasize educative dimensions, the data desks also sought to design the projects to be simple, fun, and playful (Appelgren and Jönsson, 2020). In order to learn more about the various dimensions of hard/soft news in the production and presentation of public service news, future research should investigate data journalism within and in comparison with the general news flow.…”