Mervi Pantti
Biographic Data
| ID | 4196806 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mervi Pantti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mervi |
| FAMILY NAME | Pantti |
| SIGNATURE | PANTTI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9332-1556 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 564 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The affective epistemic labor of trans people: Sharing knowledge in media spaces
The global anti-trans backlash, which seeks to erase knowledge about trans lives and perpetuates epistemic violence, is well-documented. This article examines trans people's efforts to counter epistemic violence by analyzing their experiences of sharing trans knowledge in the media . We propose the concept of affective epistemic labor , which encompasses the emotional resources required to communicate alternative knowledge claims and the communic…
Kahden lännen välissä: Rajaturvallisuuskeskustelun episteeminen hallinta suomalaisessa uutismediassa
Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan rajaturvallisuuslaista käytyä keskustelua suomalaisessa uutismediassa (Helsingin Sanomatja Ilta-Sanomat) ja poliittisessa lehdistössä (Demokraatti, Kansan Uutiset, Nykypäivä, Suomenmaa, Suomen Uutiset, Verde). Tutkimuksen teoreettis-metodologinen viitekehys ammentaa rajan käsitteestä ja länsimaiden diskursiivista rakentumista tarkastelevasta kriittisestä tutkimusperinteestä ja hyödyntää uutistekstien analyysissä e…
Lasten uutiset, sota ja episteemiset oikeudet: Toimittajien näkemyksiä lasten oikeudesta tietoon ja suojeluun
Lapsille suunnatuilla uutismedioilla on keskeinen rooli lasten episteemisten oikeuksien turvaamisessa. Tarve lasten omille uutisille korostuu nykyisessä mediaympäristössä, jossa sosiaalinen media tuo lasten ulottuville myös haitallisia sisältöjä. Ukrainan sodan myötä sota on yleistynyt uutisaiheena lapsille suunnatuissa uutisissa. Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan, miten lasten uutisten toimittajat hahmottavat lapsille suunnattujen uutismedioiden…
Social media platforms as geopolitical actors: Global inequalities in the social media content moderation of violent conflict
This study examines how major social media platforms articulated their roles as geopolitical actors during two distinct violent conflicts: the Tigray War in Ethiopia and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of platforms’ corporate communications, the article explores how social media companies framed their responsibilities and policy interventions in each case, and how these positions were criticized by state and civ…
Alustojen valta, käyttäjien vastuu: Sosiaalinen media ongelmana kansanedustajien puheessa
Artikkeli tarkastelee, miten suomalaiset kansanedustajat hahmottavat sosiaalisen median yhteiskunnallisia haittoja ja millaiset ongelmanmäärittelyt heidän puheessaan korostuvat. Aineistona ovat kansanedustajien sosiaalista mediaa koskevat puheenvuorot eduskunnan täysistunnoissa vuosina 2006–2024. Teoreettinen lähestymistapamme kytkeytyy sosiaalisten representaatioiden teoriaan, ja analyyttisena kehikkona toimii WPR-lähestymistapa, joka erottelee …
Empowering Voters and Fostering Healthy Political Discourse: Discursive Legitimation by Digital Media Platforms in the Context of Elections
The role of digital media platforms as societal actors has been increasingly brought to the fore in recent years. We have also grown to understand how platforms foster actors and media formats not motivated by liberal and democratic norms. Critical scholarship has pointed out the role of platforms in amplifying extreme content and misinformation, allowing for the manipulation of political processes and communication, and intervening in the proces…
Platform Values and Strategic Positioning: An Analysis of TikTok’s Community Guidelines and Public Communications in 2018-2024
As large digital platforms are criticized for lacking accountability to lawmakers, stakeholders, and publics, their discourse on values has become a strategic positioning to showcase their fidelity to the public good. The Chinese short-video platform TikTok, which has proved both popular and controversial since its emergence in 2018, serves as an example of how platforms employ values to respond to external demands. Drawing from positioning theor…
Trans experiences of epistemic recognition against the backdrop of the Finnish trans act reform
Gender recognition law reforms, proposing greater trans equality and agency, are pivotal moments of hope for gender minorities, but they can also result in harmful public debates. Pairing the theories of recognition and epistemic injustice, we examine trans experiences of epistemic recognition in relation to the Finnish Trans Act reform debate. Through thematic analysis of 31 semi-structured interviews with trans and non-binary individuals, we sh…
Participation Paradox: Asylum Seekers' Everyday Participation in Finland
Asylum seekers are separated from the receiving society by the legislation, marginalising societal discourses and institutional practices of the reception system. By engaging in previous studies on how asylum seekers exert agency within the limits of existing power relations and structural constraints, we examine asylum seekers' everyday participation in reception centres and the local community. We uncover the participation paradox, in which con…
A Framework for Assessing the Role of Public Service Media Organizations in Countering Disinformation
Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinformation. The remit of PSM, formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy and quality, implies a responsibility to fight disinformation by producing fact-based news content and finding anti-disinformation solutions. In this article, we introduce a framework for assessing how PSM organizations are able to counter disinformation in …
Visual images as affective anchors: Strategic narratives in Russia’s Channel One coverage of the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts
This article explores and compares the visual images used by Channel One (Ch1), Russia’s biggest state-aligned television broadcaster, to justify Russia’s intervention in two major geopolitical conflicts in recent history: the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and Syria’s civil war. The data reveal that while Ch1’s projection of Ukrainian conflict is anchored in compassion to the Eastern Ukraine population speaking the Russian language, the Syria…
Shifting Formations, Formative Infrastructures: Nationalisms and Racisms in Media Circulation
This introduction to the special issue departs from elaborating on the issues explored in a project examining right-wing politics and “debates” about racism in Finland. It situates the research gathered in the collection in terms of a shared focus on the disparate networks of organised and opportunistic cultural producers that invest time and labour in the production of racialising and othering discourse and aesthetics, and on the modes and forms…
Journalism and Emotional Work
This essay introduces the special issue entitled Journalism and Emotional Work. It argues the need for a context-sensitive understanding of emotional work in journalism profession. Contributions to the issue elucidate the social context for and the social consequences of emotional work. It demonstrates that journalists' emotional work is shaped by the changes in the industry and specific contexts in which they carry out their work
Introduction: The emotional turn in journalism
In journalism studies, an interest in emotions has gathered momentum during the last decade, leading to an increasingly diverse investigation of the affective and emotional aspects of production, text and audience engagement with journalism which we describe as an “emotional turn.” The attention to emotion in journalism studies is a relatively recent development, sustained by the concurrent rise of digital information technologies that have accen…
Broadcasting the Movement and Branding Political Microcelebrities: Finnish Anti-Immigration Video Practices on YouTube
This paper examines how the video-sharing platform YouTube was utilized by networks of anti-immigration activists that began emerging in Finland during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. By combining network analysis with qualitative analysis, we identified three central strategies of video activism: movement building through documentation, discursive controversy generation, and personal branding practices. These strategies are firmly supporte…
A Sense of Place: VR Journalism and Emotional Engagement
Virtual reality (VR) and other immersive technologies introduce new opportunities for emotionally compelling narratives and user agency. Virtually mediated environments lie at the heart of immersive journalism (IJ) experiences, foregrounding a sense of presence and bridging the connection between the user and the character. Mediated environments in VR stories provide more than a setting since the user can interact with and respond to the surround…
Migrant Youths and YouTube Entertainment: Media Participation in Post-Migrant Finland
Recent media studies in Europe have stressed the importance of studying socie- ties' negotiations on migration and the ability of migrants and other ethnic minorities to participate in these processes. Social media platforms have been widely praised for their openness to culturally diverse voices and representations. For minorities who have often been ignored and misrepresented in traditional media, these platforms arguably provide an empowering …
Journalism and Witnessing
This chapter focuses on the key issues that have preoccupied the scholarship examining witnessing and mass media: the construction of authority, authenticity, and moral responsibility in different forms of witnessing acts. It discusses how witnessing has been conceptualized in journalism and media scholarship and how technological developments have shaped these conceptualizations. Witness testimonies offering firsthand evidence about critical sit…
Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment
In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-or…
Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging: Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on th…
The meanings of racism: Public discourses about racism in Finnish news media and online discussion forums
Understandings of racism are produced and circulated in contemporary networked media forms, contributing new opportunities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images and frameworks. This study investigated how the concept of racism is used in Finnish public debate by employing a computational text analysis technique to derive topics related to racism from a large corpus of news media content and online discussion forum comments. …
Networked publics as agents of accountability: Online interactions between citizens, the media and immigration officials during the European refugee crisis
This study examines how citizens made use of online platforms to direct diverging critiques and demands at the Finnish Immigration Service during what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in Europe. Focusing on peak periods of debate, identified using big data, we closely observe how public scrutiny of the immigration service occurred in the interactions between online users, the news media and the agency itself. Our analysis indicates that…
Caught between sympathy and suspicion: Journalistic Perceptions and Practices of Telling Asylum Seekers’ Personal Stories
Personal stories in news reports serve multiple purposes, but at their core lie efforts at illustrating and authenticating a social or political issue through human experience, an illustration that is compelling in its affective appeal. Telling the personal stories of people belonging to minority groups may work as a potent journalistic vehicle in countering negative stereotypes and prejudices against them. This article examines how Finnish journ…
Naturalising the new cold war: The geopolitics of framing the Ukrainian conflict in four European newspapers
The conflict in Ukraine has prompted analyses about the return of cold war divisions to Europe. This study focusses on the role the news media plays in the conflict by examining how the visual and textual practices of news framing help constitute geopolitical rationality and legitimise foreign policy. We analyse how the framing of the conflict in Die Welt, Dagens Nyheter, Helsingin Sanomat and The Guardian developed through four key events betwee…
The Personalisation of Conflict Reporting: Visual coverage of the Ukraine crisis on Twitter
This study explores the question of the blurring of traditional boundaries between the personal and the professional in relation to images tweeted during the Ukraine conflict. The study focuses on two Moscow-based correspondents, Shaun Walker and Alec Luhn, and a photojournalist, Paul Hansen, all of whom created parallel conflict narratives on Twitter while reporting on the Ukraine conflict for legacy newspapers. Their use of Twitter is examined …
The value of emotion: An examination of television journalists’ notions on emotionality
This article engages with current discussions about public emotions by examining journalists’ perceptions of the value of emotional expression in broadcast news. First, the study provides insight into how journalists assess the place and role of emotion in news reporting and the perceived emotionalizing of news. Second, it examines how the journalists’ discourse about emotion is linked to their ideas of ‘good journalism’, as well as to their prof…
Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images
This study, based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and Sweden, explores how the professional ideology of journalists is shaped by the international trend of citizen witnessing. Citizen-created photographs and videos that have become a routine feature of mainstream news coverage are approached as a potential force of change that transforms professional imaginaries of journalism vis-a-vis crisis events…
Fake News: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict
The crisis in Ukraine has accentuated the position of Russian television as the government’s strongest asset in its information warfare. The internet, however, allows other players to challenge the Kremlin’s narrative by providing counter-narratives and debunking distorted information and fake images. Accounting for the new media ecology—through which strategic narratives are created and interpreted, this article scrutinizes the narratives of all…
Misfortunes, memories and sunsets: Non-professional images in Dutch news media
In the professional news media, invitations to submit photos and video material are the most common means of allowing citizens to participate in the content production, as opposed to merely commenting on professional material. Based on interviews with leading journalists in different media in the Netherlands, this study examines how professional journalists respond to the phenomenon of amateur photography, how it is assessed in terms of journalis…
Talking alone: Reality TV, emotions and authenticity
This article examines reality TV as an illustration of contemporary confessional culture in which the key attraction is the disclosure of true emotions. This article hopes to contribute to the understanding of the production of self-disclosure through a formal analysis of international and domestic dating, adventure and lifestyle-oriented reality shows broadcast on Finnish television between 2002 and 2004. The diverse programmes verify that reali…
Getting Closer: Encounters of the national media with global images
Drawing on the idea that citizen images of crisis events can function as “ruptures” within mainstream journalistic narratives—instances in which distant others can speak and be heard—this article examines from a dual perspective how the global citizen images (photographs and videos) embedded in Finnish print and broadcast coverage of the Arab uprisings and the Japan tsunami disaster facilitate the construction of cosmopolitan imagination. Specifi…
Introduction: The emotional turn in journalism
In journalism studies, an interest in emotions has gathered momentum during the last decade, leading to an increasingly diverse investigation of the affective and emotional aspects of production, text and audience engagement with journalism which we describe as an “emotional turn.” The attention to emotion in journalism studies is a relatively recent development, sustained by the concurrent rise of digital information technologies that have accen…
Naturalising the new cold war: The geopolitics of framing the Ukrainian conflict in four European newspapers
The conflict in Ukraine has prompted analyses about the return of cold war divisions to Europe. This study focusses on the role the news media plays in the conflict by examining how the visual and textual practices of news framing help constitute geopolitical rationality and legitimise foreign policy. We analyse how the framing of the conflict in Die Welt, Dagens Nyheter, Helsingin Sanomat and The Guardian developed through four key events betwee…
Refugee debate and networked framing in the hybrid media environment
In this article, we analyse how the debate on the ‘refugee crisis’ has been constructed in Finnish news media and social media by using big data analytics. The study applies big data with the aim of exploring the dynamics between the mainstream news media and social media and the ways in which these dynamics shape and strategically amplify different understandings of the refugee crisis. The research highlights over-emphasis of crime and threat-or…
The Personalisation of Conflict Reporting: Visual coverage of the Ukraine crisis on Twitter
This study explores the question of the blurring of traditional boundaries between the personal and the professional in relation to images tweeted during the Ukraine conflict. The study focuses on two Moscow-based correspondents, Shaun Walker and Alec Luhn, and a photojournalist, Paul Hansen, all of whom created parallel conflict narratives on Twitter while reporting on the Ukraine conflict for legacy newspapers. Their use of Twitter is examined …
Flagging Finnishness: Reproducing National Identity in Reality Television
The worldwide success of reality television has received plenty of academic and public attention. All the debates seem both implicitly and explicitly to address reality TV as a global phenomenon, but little attention has been given to any national characteristics that may emerge in its localized variations. In this article, using a Finnish adventure show Extreme Escapades as a case, we argue that national television still plays an important role …
Masculine tears, feminine tears - and crocodile tears: Mourning Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Finnish newspapers
The supposed ‘emotionalization’ of the public sphere has recently been the target of much hostile commentary, both lay and academic. In the news media, there certainly seems to be a growing interest in emotion, as more and more space is devoted to the representations of mourning in the coverage of major disasters or extraordinary deaths. In this study I look at the news coverage of the display of public grief in the Finnish newspapers following t…
Proximity As A Journalistic Keyword In The Digital Era: A study on the “closeness” of amateur news images
Proximity is an ambiguous journalistic notion for which there is no single definition. In this article, we re-evaluate the relevance and use of the concept in the digital news environment. Based on interviews with journalists in Finland and audience focus groups in Finland and the United Kingdom, we ask how new forms of visual amateur production incorporated into professional news journalism have transformed the concept. The concept of proximity …
Networked publics as agents of accountability: Online interactions between citizens, the media and immigration officials during the European refugee crisis
This study examines how citizens made use of online platforms to direct diverging critiques and demands at the Finnish Immigration Service during what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in Europe. Focusing on peak periods of debate, identified using big data, we closely observe how public scrutiny of the immigration service occurred in the interactions between online users, the news media and the agency itself. Our analysis indicates that…
Professional role enactment amid information warfare: War correspondents tweeting on the Ukraine conflict
War correspondents work within a networked media environment characterised not only by an explosion of information but also a wide range of actors producing competing narratives and viewpoints. This study examines the ways in which war correspondents enact their professional roles when tweeting from within a conflict zone. The analysis sheds light on the conditions of modern information warfare in the context of reporting from within the Ukraine …
Mourning Becomes the Nation: Television coverage of the murder of Pim Fortuyn
This article enters the debate on media events by analysing Dutch television news reporting of the death of controversial right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. It aims to demonstrate how the coverage of the murder, in particular the representation of emotions, was implicated in the construction of a national, multicultural consensus. A nationwide bereaved community was created by focusing on expressions of mourning, and converting emotions like ange…
Seeing and not seeing the Syrian crisis: New visibility and the visual framing of the Syrian conflict in seven newspapers and their online editions
This cross-national study analyzes the visual construction of the Syrian crisis in the quality press of seven countries. The crisis has held the world’s attention for over two and a half years and provides a compelling case study due to the difficulties professional journalists have in covering its events as well as the Syrian opposition’s innovative social media strategies, which focus on the dissemination of eyewitness images. Moreover, there a…
Journalism and Emotional Work
This essay introduces the special issue entitled Journalism and Emotional Work. It argues the need for a context-sensitive understanding of emotional work in journalism profession. Contributions to the issue elucidate the social context for and the social consequences of emotional work. It demonstrates that journalists' emotional work is shaped by the changes in the industry and specific contexts in which they carry out their work
The Fragility of Photo-Truth: Verification of amateur images in Finnish newsrooms
National news organisations have few means for exercising first-hand verification of amateur images in breaking news events. This article explores the attitudes Finnish journalists have towards the use of non-professional images. It examines how they perceive the need for the verification of amateur images, their responsibility with regard to that and how they practise verification and transparency in their everyday work. The results show that jo…
Obsessed with the audience: Breakfast Television Revisited
Breakfast TV identifies with the world of the television viewer. Though television as a whole is faced with the fact that viewing is mostly casual and intermittent, in the case of morning TV this is a much more fundamental aspect. Therefore breakfast television has consciously adopted the role of structuring and sustaining household routines, in order to become part of them. To find out how the diverse needs and interests of the morning audience …
Caught between sympathy and suspicion: Journalistic Perceptions and Practices of Telling Asylum Seekers’ Personal Stories
Personal stories in news reports serve multiple purposes, but at their core lie efforts at illustrating and authenticating a social or political issue through human experience, an illustration that is compelling in its affective appeal. Telling the personal stories of people belonging to minority groups may work as a potent journalistic vehicle in countering negative stereotypes and prejudices against them. This article examines how Finnish journ…
Not an act of God’: Anger and citizenship in press coverage of British man-made disasters
Anger motivates people to engage in political action, fuelling collective struggles for justice and recognition. However, because of its close association with irrationality and aggression, the public expression of anger has historically been discouraged. This article focuses on expressions of anger in British disaster coverage between 1952 and 1999. In particular, we look at the relationship between anger, journalistic practices and opportunitie…
Ordinary People and Emotional Expression in Dutch Public Service News
In news broadcasts, there is a growing tendency to rely on the voices of ordinary people in comparison with official voices, such as media professionals and experts. In our study, which is based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis and interviews with journalists, we look at the vox pops on the Dutch public service newscast, NOS News. This article addresses questions of how ordinary people take part in public discussion – what kind …
Till death do us join: Media, mourning rituals and the sacred centre of the society
Recently within media research, there has been an intensified discussion on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and the mass media. This article offers a comparative historical perspective to this debate. We look at events that have been publicly signalled as 'national tragedies' within movie newsreels and public broadcaster's news from the 1950s to the 2000s, to see how media reporting of mourning rituals has changed. We ask…
Do Crying Citizens Make Good Citizens
The present paper is framed within current debates about the need to rethink citizenship, especially with respect to the question of whether there is a legitimate place for emotion in the public sphere. Emotion has not traditionally been seen as a key to good citizenship, and there has been a fair amount of aversion among media critics towards the "emotionalization" of the public sphere and spectacular outbursts of public emotion. This paper look…
Obsessed with the audience: Breakfast Television Revisited
Breakfast TV identifies with the world of the television viewer. Though television as a whole is faced with the fact that viewing is mostly casual and intermittent, in the case of morning TV this is a much more fundamental aspect. Therefore breakfast television has consciously adopted the role of structuring and sustaining household routines, in order to become part of them. To find out how the diverse needs and interests of the morning audience …
Mourning Becomes the Nation: Television coverage of the murder of Pim Fortuyn
This article enters the debate on media events by analysing Dutch television news reporting of the death of controversial right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. It aims to demonstrate how the coverage of the murder, in particular the representation of emotions, was implicated in the construction of a national, multicultural consensus. A nationwide bereaved community was created by focusing on expressions of mourning, and converting emotions like ange…
Masculine tears, feminine tears - and crocodile tears: Mourning Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Finnish newspapers
The supposed ‘emotionalization’ of the public sphere has recently been the target of much hostile commentary, both lay and academic. In the news media, there certainly seems to be a growing interest in emotion, as more and more space is devoted to the representations of mourning in the coverage of major disasters or extraordinary deaths. In this study I look at the news coverage of the display of public grief in the Finnish newspapers following t…
Talking alone: Reality TV, emotions and authenticity
This article examines reality TV as an illustration of contemporary confessional culture in which the key attraction is the disclosure of true emotions. This article hopes to contribute to the understanding of the production of self-disclosure through a formal analysis of international and domestic dating, adventure and lifestyle-oriented reality shows broadcast on Finnish television between 2002 and 2004. The diverse programmes verify that reali…
Do Crying Citizens Make Good Citizens
The present paper is framed within current debates about the need to rethink citizenship, especially with respect to the question of whether there is a legitimate place for emotion in the public sphere. Emotion has not traditionally been seen as a key to good citizenship, and there has been a fair amount of aversion among media critics towards the "emotionalization" of the public sphere and spectacular outbursts of public emotion. This paper look…
Popular Culture and the Public Sphere: Currents of Feeling and Social Control in Talk Shows and Reality TV
The growing role of mediation in the creativity, richness, diversity and sheer ubiquity of popular culture challenge Habermas’ (1989) idea that radical democracy can be grounded in the differentiation between everyday life and the institutional spheres of politics and commerce. In a recent account of the contemporary relevance of the public sphere concept, McKee (2005) sets about reconstructing an account of the public sphere that reflects the mu…
Flagging Finnishness: Reproducing National Identity in Reality Television
The worldwide success of reality television has received plenty of academic and public attention. All the debates seem both implicitly and explicitly to address reality TV as a global phenomenon, but little attention has been given to any national characteristics that may emerge in its localized variations. In this article, using a Finnish adventure show Extreme Escapades as a case, we argue that national television still plays an important role …
Till death do us join: Media, mourning rituals and the sacred centre of the society
Recently within media research, there has been an intensified discussion on the notion of ritual and the relationship between ritual and the mass media. This article offers a comparative historical perspective to this debate. We look at events that have been publicly signalled as 'national tragedies' within movie newsreels and public broadcaster's news from the 1950s to the 2000s, to see how media reporting of mourning rituals has changed. We ask…
Ordinary People and Emotional Expression in Dutch Public Service News
In news broadcasts, there is a growing tendency to rely on the voices of ordinary people in comparison with official voices, such as media professionals and experts. In our study, which is based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis and interviews with journalists, we look at the vox pops on the Dutch public service newscast, NOS News. This article addresses questions of how ordinary people take part in public discussion – what kind …
Misfortunes, memories and sunsets: Non-professional images in Dutch news media
In the professional news media, invitations to submit photos and video material are the most common means of allowing citizens to participate in the content production, as opposed to merely commenting on professional material. Based on interviews with leading journalists in different media in the Netherlands, this study examines how professional journalists respond to the phenomenon of amateur photography, how it is assessed in terms of journalis…
The value of emotion: An examination of television journalists’ notions on emotionality
This article engages with current discussions about public emotions by examining journalists’ perceptions of the value of emotional expression in broadcast news. First, the study provides insight into how journalists assess the place and role of emotion in news reporting and the perceived emotionalizing of news. Second, it examines how the journalists’ discourse about emotion is linked to their ideas of ‘good journalism’, as well as to their prof…
Not an act of God’: Anger and citizenship in press coverage of British man-made disasters
Anger motivates people to engage in political action, fuelling collective struggles for justice and recognition. However, because of its close association with irrationality and aggression, the public expression of anger has historically been discouraged. This article focuses on expressions of anger in British disaster coverage between 1952 and 1999. In particular, we look at the relationship between anger, journalistic practices and opportunitie…
Getting Closer: Encounters of the national media with global images
Drawing on the idea that citizen images of crisis events can function as “ruptures” within mainstream journalistic narratives—instances in which distant others can speak and be heard—this article examines from a dual perspective how the global citizen images (photographs and videos) embedded in Finnish print and broadcast coverage of the Arab uprisings and the Japan tsunami disaster facilitate the construction of cosmopolitan imagination. Specifi…
Window to the West: Memories of Watching Finnish Television in Estonia During The Soviet Period
This study is concerned with the memories of Estonians of watching Finnish television during the last decades of the Soviet occupation. We will look at the practices of watching Finnish television in Soviet Estonia and the meanings attributed to it. Finnish television took North-Estonians into a colourful world of consumption and entertainment, while at the same time educating them about Western values and encouraging them to dream a better futur…
Seeing and not seeing the Syrian crisis: New visibility and the visual framing of the Syrian conflict in seven newspapers and their online editions
This cross-national study analyzes the visual construction of the Syrian crisis in the quality press of seven countries. The crisis has held the world’s attention for over two and a half years and provides a compelling case study due to the difficulties professional journalists have in covering its events as well as the Syrian opposition’s innovative social media strategies, which focus on the dissemination of eyewitness images. Moreover, there a…
Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images
This study, based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and Sweden, explores how the professional ideology of journalists is shaped by the international trend of citizen witnessing. Citizen-created photographs and videos that have become a routine feature of mainstream news coverage are approached as a potential force of change that transforms professional imaginaries of journalism vis-a-vis crisis events…
Proximity As A Journalistic Keyword In The Digital Era: A study on the “closeness” of amateur news images
Proximity is an ambiguous journalistic notion for which there is no single definition. In this article, we re-evaluate the relevance and use of the concept in the digital news environment. Based on interviews with journalists in Finland and audience focus groups in Finland and the United Kingdom, we ask how new forms of visual amateur production incorporated into professional news journalism have transformed the concept. The concept of proximity …
Disaster news and public emotions
Grassroots humanitarianism on YouTube: Ordinary fundraisers, unlikely donors, and global solidarity
Social media have become important channels for directing humanitarian communication. Aid organizations increasingly use social networks and simultaneously we have seen the emergence of self-organizing volunteers who take on a variety of humanitarian tasks that previously belonged to institutional agents. The focus of this study is on user-created disaster appeal videos on YouTube, which are a type of citizen communication that occurs in the afte…
The Fragility of Photo-Truth: Verification of amateur images in Finnish newsrooms
National news organisations have few means for exercising first-hand verification of amateur images in breaking news events. This article explores the attitudes Finnish journalists have towards the use of non-professional images. It examines how they perceive the need for the verification of amateur images, their responsibility with regard to that and how they practise verification and transparency in their everyday work. The results show that jo…
Fake News: The narrative battle over the Ukrainian conflict
The crisis in Ukraine has accentuated the position of Russian television as the government’s strongest asset in its information warfare. The internet, however, allows other players to challenge the Kremlin’s narrative by providing counter-narratives and debunking distorted information and fake images. Accounting for the new media ecology—through which strategic narratives are created and interpreted, this article scrutinizes the narratives of all…
Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook
The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mu…
Professional role enactment amid information warfare: War correspondents tweeting on the Ukraine conflict
War correspondents work within a networked media environment characterised not only by an explosion of information but also a wide range of actors producing competing narratives and viewpoints. This study examines the ways in which war correspondents enact their professional roles when tweeting from within a conflict zone. The analysis sheds light on the conditions of modern information warfare in the context of reporting from within the Ukraine …
Naturalising the new cold war: The geopolitics of framing the Ukrainian conflict in four European newspapers
The conflict in Ukraine has prompted analyses about the return of cold war divisions to Europe. This study focusses on the role the news media plays in the conflict by examining how the visual and textual practices of news framing help constitute geopolitical rationality and legitimise foreign policy. We analyse how the framing of the conflict in Die Welt, Dagens Nyheter, Helsingin Sanomat and The Guardian developed through four key events betwee…
The Personalisation of Conflict Reporting: Visual coverage of the Ukraine crisis on Twitter
This study explores the question of the blurring of traditional boundaries between the personal and the professional in relation to images tweeted during the Ukraine conflict. The study focuses on two Moscow-based correspondents, Shaun Walker and Alec Luhn, and a photojournalist, Paul Hansen, all of whom created parallel conflict narratives on Twitter while reporting on the Ukraine conflict for legacy newspapers. Their use of Twitter is examined …
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Media studies (32 works) · Law (27 works) · Media Studies and Communication (24 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Public Relations and Crisis Communication (14 works)