Development trends and challenges in Nordic political journalism

The objective of this chapter is to describe and discuss some important political journalism development trends in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The term political journalism traditionally refers to news, commentaries, and other genres related to the coverage of political processes, institutions, and policy questions. It is, however, difficult to draw a clear dividing line between political news and other types of current affairs coverage. While political logic once dominated the discourses of political journalism, the emergence of the news media as an independent institution gave journalists a substantial definitional power and an ability to define the communicative rules of the game, but professional political sources quickly learned to exploit news media logics for their own aims and objectives. During the last decade, the growth of social media networks and the relative weakening of the legacy media has created a less stable situation for the negotiation of control between journalists and their sources.