Climate change communication spans multiple disciplines which in many cases have insufficient understanding of each other's research traditions and, therefore, there has not been a solid interdisciplinary debate. This makes it hard not only to survey the field at large but also to pinpoint further studies which are needed to bridge these knowledge divides. The aim of this systematic literature review is to shed a broader light on the field of environmental and climate change communication and to make possible research gaps more apparent. Through an extensive quantitative content analysis of journal articles (N= 407), this study provides an understanding of the methodological, theoretical, and geographical approaches within the field. The findings show that a typical study within the field is a quantitative content analysis of traditional news media in the West. We have also uncovered some important insufficiencies of the search engines commonly used when carrying out literature reviews.

Media matter. Most citizens’ in contemporary democracies get their information about current affairs and politics through the media. Political communication studies have for long time analysed the interplay between media content and journalistic style and political attitudes and public trust in political institutions. This paper adds to this discussion by addressing another dimension: the possible impact of journalistic transparency – offered in online-journalism – on political trust.

Methodologically, the study was based on a web-based experiment including 1,320 respondents. The treatment groups comprised the same version of an online news article with additional indicators for disclosure transparency and participatory transparency. The article covered a local political issue and politicians form both ruling and opposition political parties appeared in the text.

The results indicate that transparency effects on political trust may be overestimated. This experimental study did not confirm any significant positive correlation between transparency and the public trust towards local politicians appearing in the news.

Over the last decade, free labor has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding new or semi-new forms of labor in the contemporary digital economy. This article critiques and develops this concept, with specific reference to work in the media industries, by presenting a historically grounded typology of free labor that also highlights some of the analytical problems with the current use of the concept. Our typology presents seven metaphors of free labor based on historical instances of roles people have taken on when performing unpaid labor: those of The Slave, The Carer, The Apprentice, The Prospector, The Hobbyist, The Volunteer, and The Patsy. A key conclusion is that free labor is performed by different actors at either end of increasingly complex and temporally stretched out value chains. This necessitates a more fine-grained and historicized use of the concept of free labor.

Over the last decade, free labor has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding new or semi-new forms of labor in the contemporary digital economy. This paper critiques and develops this concept, with specific reference to work in the media industries, by presenting a historically grounded typology of free labor that also highlights some of the analytical problems with the current use of the concept. Our typology presents eight metaphors of free labor based on historical instances of roles people have taken on when performing unpaid labor: those of The Slave, The Carer, The Apprentice, The Prospector, The Hobbyist, The Volunteer, The Agent and The Patsy. A key conclusion is that free labor is performed by different actors at either end of increasingly complex and temporally stretched out value chains. This should motivate, or so we argue, a more fine-grained scholarly use of the concept of free labor.

The use of native advertising has sparked a heated debate within traditional news media. While similar formats have a long history within journalism, this new iteration furthers the blurring of boundaries between news and ads by producing ads that look and feel like news but that are clearly labeled as advertising. The novelty of native advertising is that it advocates for openly merging commercial and editorial content, aggravating an existing tension between the professional and commercial logics of journalism. This open relationship between journalists and marketers calls for revisiting the traditional narrative that sustains journalistic autonomy.

Traditional news outlets are on the decline and journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle tosurvive. New models of delivering news to the public are being explored in order to increase the levelsof readership and user engagement.The narrative of this chapter focuses on the future of journalismand media, and the potential benefits and dangers of gamifying journalism. Since gamification is a newtrend, a thorough look at the intersection between the enhancements of public mobility, the digitalizationof news services, and the engagement of gamified systems can bring better understanding of futurechannels of reading news to the users, to researchers, and to the industry. This chapter aims to bridgethe gap between gamification as an emerging practice in news distribution and yet a vastly unchartedarea or research.

Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts (n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed over 69 million interactions across three metrics of engagement (i.e. comments, likes, and shares). More concretely, we investigate whether the patterns of engagement follow distinct patterns across national boundaries and type of outlet ownership. While we are skeptical of metrics of engagement as markers of specific cultures of engagement, our results show that there are clear differences in how readers engage with news posts depending on the country of origin and whether they are fully state-owned or private-owned outlets.

Fueled by a narrative of crisis, managers and editors have openly advocated for merging commercial and editorial content that is distributed following the same journalistic visual design. As native advertising has become a prominent format used by many news organizations globally, this transgression of the traditional wall that is supposed to separate commercial and editorial content challenges two of journalism's fundamental ethical principles: transparency and autonomy. This chapter offers a critical overview of native advertising in journalism. First, we unpack the appeal of native advertising for news media and how this practice actively blurs the line between disclosure and deception as the mechanism by which advertisers appropriate the publishers' influence and trust. Second, we discuss the ethical considerations of incorporating native advertising. From a production perspective, passing commercial content for news is a threat to journalistic authority. The open advocacy for native advertising from within the industry is, however, nothing short of alarming because it symbolizes the surrender of public service ideals to market forces. Failing to adhere to conventional journalism ethics could lead to the potential alienation of the people who gave journalism its legitimacy and to further dismantling news media's journalistic authority, but this time, from within.

In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets' websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all Scandinavian news outlets' Facebook posts including their respective websites' article teasers over the course of 11 months. We investigate the use of news text grammar (e.g., punctuation or the use of pronouns) and social media features (e.g., hashtags or the use of emojis) alongside structural influences from individual countries, outlet reach, and ownership. Findings show Facebook posts to include less punctuation while employing more calls to action through the use of question and exclamation marks. We conclude with a reinvigorated call for hierarchical considerations when investigating news outlets' social media endeavours through editors' experiences, available resources to a news outlet, and institutional willingness to align with audiences.

Although participatory journalism involves publishing content created by users, editorial influence is an impor- tant aspect of participatory online media. Editors shape the conditions under which user generated content is produced, the context of publication and the perceived prominence of the content. It is still unclear how this influence manifests itself, and how it can be related to the discussion about participatory media’s potential for revi- talising democracy. In this paper, three online news media in Sweden are analysed comparatively: Sourze – the first Swedish participatory newspaper; Newsmill – a social me- dia focusing on news and debate; and DN – the online ver- sion of the largest Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter. The question is how participation is affected by editorial influence. The findings suggest that participatory arenas are constrained by the logic of their context of production. People from different categories in society participate on different terms. Furthermore, editors influence the agenda by suggesting topics, and by rewarding articles that fol- low their suggestions. These findings do not challenge assumptions about participatory newspapers as more accessible channels for citizens and therefore interesting as possible means of allowing a more democratically involved citizenry, but it challenges assumptions about freedom from constraints related to traditional mass media, such as agenda setting, gate-keeping and media logic.

Previous research on citizen journalism has an Anglo-Saxon bias and frequently studies specific cases that focus on conflict, crisis events or war creating a selection bias of existing and, at least modestly, successful examples. In this study, situated in Sweden, we reverse the process and examine how actual communities are served by digital citizen community journalism in an everyday context. The study has a particular focus on how events are portrayed in terms of news topics dimensions, framing, presentation style, geographical focus and the authorship of news items. Preliminary findings indicate that the citizen journalists’ only present one perspective, rarely refers to policy plans or talks to the actors involved and provide individual and episodic news frames. Their focus is mostly on the local level and they have embraced the impersonal and unemotional presentation style from mainstream news. Half of the news items are being written by citizens while representatives from organisations or politicians author a quarter of them.   All in all, citizen journalism in general falls short from both traditional journalistic standards and many scholarly claims of being alternative.

In this study, the results from a content analysis of four Swedish online citizen journalism outlets are presented and discussed. The analysis focuses on new digital venues for news-making in theory and the question of the political relevance of citizen journalism in reality. This broad question is operationalized by asking more specifically how citizen journalists tell the news, according to established distinctions between variations in topic dimensions, focus, and presentational style. Our results show that citizen journalists tend to tell soft news. They rarely report on policy issues, local authorities, or people affected by decisions being made by them. Furthermore, the news focuses on individual relevance and is mostly episodic in nature. The style of writing is predominantly impersonal and unemotional. In sum, our results suggest that citizen journalism in Sweden is not yet at a stage where it can be considered a plausible alternative to traditional journalism.

Terms such as liquid, dynamic and fluid news have been used to illustrate and emphasize the ever-changing, user-influenced and border-crossing nature of contemporary online news. However, although often used, what such terms actually denote often remains unspecified, and no existing studies have tried to propose a way to measure and analyse the impact of liquidity’s potential on authentic online news. The three-fold purpose of this exploratory study is therefore to move towards a clearer understanding of liquid news and to propose and explore a method of empirically measuring online news’s liquidity.

Content analysis has been a commonly used method of social science for decades and can be considered to be an inseparable part of media and communication studies. It has formed basis for important theoretical advances within the field such as agenda setting, framing and cultivation theory. Yet, paradoxically, not all media content can, as I will argue, be properly analyzed within a traditional content analysis approach. In this paper inherent assumptions of content analysis is juxtaposed with the logic of digital and, increasingly, mobile media. In particular the difference between traditional content analysis need for ‘dead’ objects and the liquid and lively character of digital media is emphasized. Moreover, the paper proposes and discusses kernels of methodological approaches designed to study the content of digital media on it’s own terms.

Although considerable efforts have been pursued in studying online news no studies so far have investigated how the actual news content is affected by digitalization in general, if at all, or compared different media traditions. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This empirical study, covering Swedish and UK news sites with a tabloid, quality morning, and local/regional background between 2002-2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it is stronger in tabloids and in Sweden compared to the UK. Further, this tabloidization can be more precisely described as a lifestylization and de-politization process as it is in these areas where the biggest growth and decline are. In addition, the study reveals that it is the slower news that increases most suggesting that the immediate character of online news is mediated by production conditions.

This study investigates the kinds of transparency that appeal to different parts of the public and the extent to which transparency can be a remedy for declining trust in journalism. It uses a representative survey of Swedes, and the results show that there are three distinct forms of transparency, including the previously unreported ambient transparency, and that they appeal to different people. News consumption or social media use has little or no effect on transparency. The strongest positive effect on transparency comes from appreciation of the current quality of journalistic performance, high trust in journalists and media, and having news media and authorities as the preferred channels of information. Those most skeptical about journalism are also least positive about transparency. The results suggest that transparency has very limited reach as a cure for declining trust in, and the trustworthiness of, journalism, possibly since the acts of transparency themselves remain non-transparent.

Research concerning user participation in online news has demonstrated that news websites offer a wide range of participatory features, but largely permit users only to comment on already- published material. This longitudinal analysis of Sweden’s four major mainstream national news websites focuses on front-page news items to investigate to what extent user participation has increased over time and whether the participatory features present allow users to exert control over key journalistic processes. Its findings indicate that user participation has increased rapidly in regard to processes peripheral to news journalism, but also that users have to a minor extent begun over time to perform work previously reserved for professional journalists.

Scholars have been studying online journalism for well over fifteen years theorizing how this new environment affects news. A reoccurring argument is that a combination of real time tracking of the audience behavior in conjunction with a lack of viable business models fosters a journalistic culture with increasing sensational and shallow news. In effect, leading to a lesser-informed citizenry and a weaker democracy. Although considerable efforts have been pursued in studying online news no studies so far have investigated how the actual news content is affected in general, if at all, or compared different media traditions. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This study, covering Swedish and UK media from 2002-2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it varies across publishing contexts and reveals some unexpected results.

Although considerable efforts have studied online news, studies so far have not investigated how the actual news topics are affected by digitalization in general, if at all, or compared them to different media constructs. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This empirical study, covering Swedish and UK news sites within tabloid, quality morning, and local/regional varieties between 2002 and 2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it is stronger in tabloids and in Sweden compared to the UK. Further, this tabloidization can be more precisely described as a shift from political to more lifestyle journalism, as it is in the areas where the prime growth and decline are found. In addition, the study reveals that it is the slower news that increases most suggesting that the immediate character of online news is mediated by production conditions

Although considerable efforts have been pursued in studying online news no studies so far have investigated how the actual news topics is affected by digitalization in general, if at all, or compared different media traditions. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This empirical study, covering Swedish and UK news sites with a tabloid, quality morning, and local/regional background between 2002-2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it is stronger in tabloids and in Sweden compared to the UK. Further, this tabloidization can be more precisely described as a lifestylization and de-politization process as it is in these areas where the biggest growth and decline are. In addition, the study reveals that it is the slower news that increases most suggesting that the immediate character of online news is mediated by production conditions.

Using journalistic normative theory as backdrop, this study tests whether the news cycle of online news differs from that of the traditional paper medium on four Swedish websites. Further it is investigated if the high speed and continuous flow of information on the Internet has any impact on the quality at online news. Finally it is argued that that the speed of which information is published on the Internet will raise serious questions about the quality, integrity and trustworthiness of the news product. Findings like these could, if commonly found, lead to a debate about and a redefinition of journalism in both online and traditional media.

Frågan om hur medierna rapporterar om olika samhälleliga hot och riskerär på flera sätt central. De flesta inser att mediebevakningen inte är någonexakt spegling av de faktiska hot mänskligheten står inför, utan i stället ärett resultat av en medveten nyhetsvärdering där vissa händelser avmedierna bedöms som mer intressanta än andra att skildra.Varför vissa hot och risker på detta sätt beskrivs som allvarliga kriser imedierna, medan andra hot och risker (ofta av samma karaktär) inte är gördet är väl värt att fundera över. Det är också utgångspunkten förforskningsprojektet Hot på agendan som Demokratiinstitutet DEMICOMgenomfört 2005-2008 med finansiering från KrisberedskapsmyndighetenKBM.Denna rapport ingår i en serie av flera rapporter som dokumenterarprojektet. I rapporten Kriskommunikation i förändring. Internet, den ökadepubliceringshastigheten och de förändrade villkoren för kriskommunikationanalyserar Michael Karlsson hur Internet förändrar krisjournalistikensvillkor. För rapportens innehåll och slutsatser svarar författaren själv.

The Internet has the potential to change how organizations communicate with the public, both by allowing them to bypass news media by having their own websites and by offering interactive features and multimedia on their websites. Simultaneously, major news media remains an important factor, especially online, where more and more people visit them for information. Online news functions differently compared to traditional news with regards to, for instance, the much shorter news cycle, which implies that issues can surface and disappear quickly. This provides an intriguing setting where online media can report quickly on any issue and where organizations indicated as stakeholders in the issue can reply on their own websites. This study uses three cases, encompassing 14 organizations, to investigate if and how organizations reply on their websites when they have been identified as stakeholders in an issue. The results indicate that organizations are far from realizing the full potential of their websites.