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The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.

This article explores how political parties and individual politicians in Sweden communicate strategically in an online environment where the close relationship between news and journalistic institutions no longer can be taken for granted. We define the adoption and adaption of journalistic conventions in political communication as a particular communication style, conceptualized as "parasitic news". The article presents an analytical framework that explicates the role of parasitic news across five dimensions: ideological transparency/position, alternativeness, news genres, individual vs. collective media practices, and social media affordances. An analysis of three news projects, representing right-wing populist, liberal/conservative, and left-wing/green ideological positions, reveals that parasitic news is a flexible communication style that blurs the boundaries of politics and media in online spaces. Moreover, parasitic news challenges the relevance of established terms such as alternative, hyper-partisan, and fake news, pointing to the need of a renewed conceptual vocabulary in journalism, media and political communication research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Patriotic journalism," a deviation from objectivity, has become an important paradigm and well-documented phenomenon in the analysis of conflict coverage. However, studies rarely focus on the link between journalists' perceptions and narratives. We investigated how journalists from two countries, one involved in a conflict (Ukraine) and the other observing it from a distance (Sweden) relate to the objectivity norm in sourcing and narrating seven conflictive news cases in Ukraine (2017 to 2018). We found pragmatic commitment to objectivity in both countries, which was not always reflected in the content produced. For Swedish journalists, our results hint toward a value-based ally loyalty, which seems less stable than a tribe-based bond. In Ukraine, official Ukrainian perspectives were undisputedly disseminated; however, we did not find that they were generally positively laden, as one would expect for patriotic journalists. Trust in public institutions might be a deciding factor over the extent of patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, with a particular focus on transformations in genres, text types and thematic repertoires. Drawing on a constructed week sample from press, television and radio during four decades (1985, 1995, 2005, 2015), we address three aspects of 'the crisis discourse' of cultural journalism: (1) the potential decline in cultural coverage due to economic cutbacks and downsized cultural desks; (2) cultural journalism's perceived 'quality crisis' connected to transformations of thematic repertoires; and (3) the alleged decline of cultural expertise related to changes in cultural journalism's generic structures. The study makes a unique contribution to cultural journalism scholarship by identifying media-specific differences and complementary relationships between media forms, building on media ecology and genre theory. In contrast to the crisis discourse, results show that cultural journalism has expanded significantly through popularization and thematic and generic diversification, but the transformations are different in press, radio and television due to differing role positions in the larger media ecosystem. In addition, some parts of the cultural journalism media ecology appear to be endangered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural journalism is a unique and underresearched subfield of journalism. This article presents the first systematic study of Swedish cultural journalism, quantitatively mapping content from four decades, zooming in on the years 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. We study conceptions of the world outside Sweden during times marked by geopolitical turning points, globalization, and rapid structural transformations in the journalistic market. Employing content analysis of a representative sample from the press and public service radio, we explore geographical and scalar aspects, with a focus on political and global dimensions. Although we found evidence for Eurocentrism and domestication--staples of Western journalism overall--results show that Swedish cultural journalism was a steady conveyor of transnational narratives during all studied periods, which together with a primarily nonconflictual approach, sets cultural journalism apart from foreign news and decreases the risk of misframing in a globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the specific features of Instagram as a platform for visual political communication. Drawing on theories of mediatization and celebrity politics, it analyses how various forms of symbolic connectivity are expressed and performed by sixteen leading politicians in Sweden, and moreover how their social media use relates to news media. The study leans on a content analysis (n=800) and results show that journalism still holds a strong symbolic value, even when politicians are in charge of the political discourse. In addition, it reveals how the platform logic of Instagram contributes to the formation of digital lifestyle politics, where symbolic connections between politicians and a variety of actors are staged through new mediatized relations. Visual political communication does inherit a democratic and interactive potential. However, according to the analysed data, most politicians avoid public interaction. Instead, they are preoccupied with the branding of their public persona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of social media raises new questions concerning the relationship between journalists and politicians and between news media and politics. The increasingly complex media milieu, in which the boundaries between media producers and audiences become partly dissolved, calls for new theoretical approaches in the study of journalism. This article reassesses central theoretical arguments about the relationship between journalism, sources, politics and democracy. Drawing on a pilot study of the printed press, it explores the increased social media use among politicians in Sweden and its implications for political journalism. The article suggests that power relations between journalism and politics can be fruitfully explored from the perspective of mediatized interdependency, a perspective that acknowledges that journalists and politicians have become both actors and sources through mutual interaction in online spaces. Furthermore, it argues that social media use has expanded journalism's interest in the private life of politicians, thereby contributing to a de-politicization of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present global media climate, speed and immediacy are increasingly prioritised characteristics of news production. As online news has developed, the idea of a single news item has been replaced by fast-changing content and new repertoires of constructing 'Breaking News'. Whereas most research of online news has used synchronic rather than diachronic methods, this article introduces a new approach, which we choose to call Regular Interval Content Capture (RICC). The data produced by RICC enables dynamic online media texts to be studied as they are produced, edited, and changed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In our study, the US 'Crucial Tuesday' primary elections serve as the empirical example. From a discourse analytical perspective, we analyse a total of 64 hours of online news flows collected from the US and International editions of CNN.com. The RICC approach allows us to find major representational differences between the two editions. Three different modes of writing, characterising different stages of CNN’s reporting, were identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]