As part of my efforts as co-director of Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg, I have been leading the digital community site of NordMedia Network since it was established in 2019. The digital site deals with very interesting community-building and community management tasks among specialized academics in the Nordics, namely media and communication researchers.

Back in the old days, the media researchers formed primarily physical communities working in national surroundings, meeting each other at onsite conferences, seminars and workshops. Today, the “Nordic family” of media researchers is predominantly digital and enjoys, as any other professional group, the possibilities of continuous connectivity. In such a landscape, a research communication centre needs to be an active community builder – a responsive manager of a community that is essentially hybrid and international, with less compatible boundaries between national states and other geographical areas.

NordMedia Network is both a medium with edited and curated content, with en editor-in-chief and a publishing certificate from the Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority, and a community tool, with a database of hundreds of registered experts.

Recently, the number of registered users at NordMedia Network passed 800 and is now approaching 830. Aspiring members create a profile and can choose to receive a newsletter collecting resources and news from the Nordic research community. At the platform, we have a database of resources including Nordic journals, book publishers and research funders, as well as Nordic academic institutions (universities, departments and institutes related to Nordic media research), academic study programmes (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral programmes in media and communication studies) and scholarly associations and networks.

In addition, the site hosts the permanent homepage for the biennial NordMedia Conference, next time to be hold in August 2023 in Bergen, and a webinar catalogue. In the content feed, we are publishing both short pieces of texts called Highlights and longer essays called Featured Articles (and if you are a media scholar, you too can contribute!). We are also developing educational resources online related to scholarly competences, such as the recent handbook Joining the scholarly conversation: The basics of writing an academic book review (2022).

The digital community involves intriguing possibilities of developing future researcher-to-researcher communication, which is a very special and requiring form or subtype of research communication. In the nearest future, we will provide Nordic research associations and networks with the possibility to launch websites for their own activities under the umbrella of NordMedia Network. Moreover, there are numerous other ideas under development, which I will be happy to update you about later.