Recently, the special issue of the Nordic media studies journal MedieKultur that dealt with “pandemedia”, journalistic reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, included an article written by me and my Latvian colleague Ilva Skulte, titled Reporting like there was no pandemic: Cultural journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland, Sweden, and Latvia.

In “Reporting like there was no pandemic”, @maaritjii and @iskulte examine how cultural journalists in Finland, Sweden, and Latvia shaped the pandemic imaginaries in their specific areas of coverage. Read the article here: https://t.co/lJWMzKuZy3 pic.twitter.com/nypSXCkAvz

— MedieKultur (@MedieKultur_) March 17, 2023

In the article, we looked at the culture pages in three countries around the Baltic Sea – Sweden, Finland and Latvia – to find out whether the reporting was changed because of the pandemic. Namely, cultural journalism is strongly dependent on seasonal cycles of cultural supply and less on news events, which creates another kind of a time horizon for the production of cultural coverage.

We discussed the concept of proactivity and discovered that much of the cultural content was delivered regardless of the unexceptional conditions prevailing in the world. This might be because of the fact that books and other cultural artifacts were released as usual, and a great extent of the visual material published on culture pages consists of photos similar to press material, shots of artists and other creators taken for the specific purpose of communication and marketing.

It was interesting to examine cultural journalism at a very unusual point of time, as the research on professionally produced arts and cultural journalism is something I have worked on for a long time. With content analysis as a method, I’m also continuing the time series of Finnish cultural journalism (1978–2008) that I analyzed in my doctoral thesis, extending the time range from 2008 onwards. I have already collected the samples from 2013 and 2018, and this year is a sample year again.

The special issue Pandemedia: How COVID-19 has affected the role of media in society (MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 38:73) was edited by my great Danish colleagues Stine Liv Johansen from Aarhus University and Thomas Enemark Lundtofte from the University of Southern Denmark.

Photo: Alin Luna, Unsplash