Producing a Drama for the Common Good: The Theatricalization of the Crisis Discourse on Cultural Journalism

Abstract

This article examines the discourses in the coverage of cultural journalism and its alleged crisis. The economical, technological, cultural and social transformations of the 21st-century media landscape have been translated into a crisis narrative that is sustained even by the practitioners themselves. The journalistic coverage concerning cultural journalism in general-interest news outlets in the period 2010-2017 includes a variety of representations of the crisis in culture and cultural journalism in the Nordic countries. By analysing the crisis in journalistic approaches as an operative concept for debating the topic in the public sphere, the study traces the functions of the crisis discourse. In this study, they are considered by applying the Aristotelian concept of thaumaston, which reflects both the inevitability of a catastrophe and the opportunity to create a reaction. The crisis narrative thus could be productive by increasing the accountability and openness in journalism while staging a drama that promotes a pessimistic representation of the topic.

Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades

“…As Blumler points out, while the civic adequacy crisis of journalism is not new, it has accelerated after the digitalization and fragmentation of the media market. The crisis of journalism is also connected to an ongoing debate among journalists and scholars about a crisis in the subfield of cultural journalism, although the sources and motivations are different (Jaakkola, 2017: 51). An example of this debate spread from Denmark and Norway to Sweden in the autumn–winter of 2017, when a series of news industry-sponsored studies of the ‘decline of criticism’ were published (e.g.…”