Research on journalists and journalistic work has focused on journalists with permanent, full-time employment. Given the rapid decrease of such employment opportunities, we argue that journalism research needs to pay more attention to those who those who have had to leave their jobs and either stopped doing journalism entirely, or who have switched to a freelance career (sometimes combining journalism with other work). This category of people is at once becoming more marginalized and “the new normal” within the occupation: In this paper, we furthermore focus on local (Swedish) journalists and ex-journalists. Based on a set of semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with ex-journalists who share the experience of having lost their permanent, full-time jobs, we use the concept of livelihood as an analytical tool. The concept of livelihood highlights the shift from journalism as a job practiced exclusive of other jobs to an activity conducted alongside other income-generating activities and makes it possible to analyse leaving the occupation from a context that incorporates the whole life situation of the respondents. This also contributes to the current wave of studies of journalism and job loss by adding qualitative data about individual experiences of job loss to the existing quantitative survey evidence.

Research on journalistic work has traditionally tended to privilege the workplace and newsroom as the main scene for journalistic practice, while reproducing male norms of work and professionalism and a clear work/life separation. Following staff cuts throughout the newspaper and media sectors across Europe and North America, there has been a sharp rise in scholarly interest in journalists’ not working, i.e. the experiences and effects of job loss and job insecurity among journalists.

We argue that due to increased precarity and blurred boundaries in/of journalistic work, livelihood is a suitable concept for analyzing both change and continuity within the gendered occupation of journalism. In this paper, we examine the liquid geographies of journalistic livelihoods by studying how (ex)journalists negotiate the tensions between occupational identities (privileging professionalism, mobility and career) and place based identities (mobilizing a sense of community belonging) in the experience of job loss.

The study is based on exploratory interviews with Swedish journalists who have left the occupation, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The paper analyzes their whole life situation, both their work lives and their private lives, when transitioning to a new profession. The study shows how both female and male (ex)journalists’ livelihood strategies are strongly rooted in the local community, revealing a wish to stay and work locally, choosing alternative work and improving their work-life balance - rather than striving to maintaining a journalistic identity. This contradicts earlier findings, which indicate that the professional identities of journalists are strong, even in the face of professional adversity.

Because the tourism industry can be affected by various natural disasters, the media landscape with increasing social media, brings to tourism new possibilities and challenges in its preparing for, and handling, such disasters. The literature has paid little attention to social media's part in such phenomena. Therefore, this study explores how social media are used by hotels following Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji using mixed methods, based on interviews (n = 12) and hotels' real time Facebook posts (n = 1288). While we find that social media were underused in preparing for the disaster and response that followed, it played a crucial role in raising funds and donations during the recovery phase. We apply the social mediated disaster resilience (SMDR) model to allow this study to fill the knowledge gap in organizational disaster resilience literature. We show how social media are integrated in resilience-building and its potential for increasing hotel resilience.

The purpose of the study was to analyse how cross-border commuting differed from intranational commuting in Sweden, and how cross-border mobilities affected spatial integration. The authors analysed patterns and spatial flows of cross-border commuting by comparing them with characteristics of intranational commuting. In the article, they explore the assumption that the border constitutes an ‘engine’ for work-related mobility, which affects processes of spatial integration in cross-border areas. The empirical material comprised data from surveys of commuting from the Swedish county of Värmland to Norway and commuting within Värmland. The findings showed that cross-border commuting shared common features with intranational commuting, including how the frequency of commuting was dependent on distance. The motives for commuting differed, and the reasons for working in Norway were economic rather than professional. In terms of spatial integration, cross-border commuting was mainly one-directional, from Sweden to Norway, while leisure mobility and migration tended to be in the opposite direction. The authors conclude that the border region is characterised by integration through specialisation, which involves a permanent state of ‘transient’ mobility. Thus, a win-win situation can be distinguished, in which the border serves as a resource and an ‘engine’ for cross-border integration, mobility and economic activities.

The pursuit for sustainability in biosphere reserve (BR) tourism entails the need not merely for tourism businesses to adapt to the changing environmental preferences of tourists but also for entrepreneurs to gain new knowledge about sustainability. Our study illustrates how place is central to grasp the processes of learning for sustainability. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we examine place-specific and social learning processes for sustainability among small-scale tourism entrepreneurs in a Swedish BR. The findings are discussed using an analytic framework, based on themes of place-specific learning emerging from the interviews. Learning for sustainability among tourism entrepreneurs entails an emphasis on both social and spatial processes. Our findings show how the small-scale tourism entrepreneurs engage in learning through their interactions with tourists at their tourism establishments, through networking with other tourism businesses and regional stakeholders, through engaging with local resources and cultural norms of the BR, and through their experiences and practices connected to their everyday lives and the private sphere.

During the last few years, several tourism destinations have faced different natural disasters, including cyclones, tsunamis and earthquakes. The transforming media landscape, including the use of social media, brings new possibilities and challenges of preparing and handling disasters. In tourism studies, few studies have explored the use of social media in disaster situations. This paper puts focus on the tourists’ roles and participation in disasters and crisis communication, based on a case study from Fiji, following tropical cyclone Winston in February 2016. The study explores the spatial and virtual dimensions of how disasters are handled, communicated and (de)constructed by tourists through social media as “spaces of the in-between”. In this context, tourists become not merely ‘victims’ by disaster events, but also powerful mediators in how the tourism destination is reshaped during a disaster, reflecting complex geographies of (im)mobility, (dis)connectedness, (un)control and inequalities. Thus, crucial questions include for what/whose purpose tourists use social media and if social media provides an arena for self-reflexivity among tourists about their own roles and impact as (potential) visitors to the disaster area in relation to other actors, including the local community. The paper has a qualitative netnographic approach, which involves studying social and cultural dimensions of online activities and how they relate and intersect with people’s everyday life. The netnographic fieldwork includes analysis of social media content (Tripadvisor and Facebook), interviews with Australian tourists who visited Fiji during and after the cyclone, as well as with hotels, resorts and tourism organisations in Fiji.   

During the last few years, several tourism destinations have faced different natural disasters, including cyclones, tsunamis and earthquakes. The transforming media landscape, including the use of social media, brings new possibilities and challenges of preparing and handling disasters. In the field of tourism geography, few studies have explored the use of social media in disaster situations. This paper puts focus on the tourists’ roles and participation in disasters and crisis communication, based on a case study from Fiji, following tropical cyclone Winston in February 2016. The study explores spatial and virtual dimensions of how disasters are handled, communicated and (de)constructed by tourists through social media by using the concept ‘tourism riskscapes’. In this context, tourists become not merely ‘victims’ by disaster events, but also powerful mediators in how the tourism destination is reshaped during a disaster, reflecting complex geographies of (im)mobility, (dis)connectedness, (un)control and inequalities. Thus, crucial questions include for what/whose purpose tourists use social media and if social media provides an arena for self-reflexivity among tourists, bringing ethical issues of tourists’ roles and impacts into focus in relation to other actors, including the local community. The paper has a qualitative netnographic approach, which involves studying social and cultural dimensions of online activities and how they relate and intersect with people’s everyday life. The netnographic fieldwork includes analysis of social media content (Tripadvisor and Facebook), interviews with Australian tourists who visited Fiji during and after the cyclone, as well as with hotels, resorts and tourism organisations in Fiji.