The latest special issue of the Danish journal Journalistica examines Nordic journalism history, highlighting the journalists, editors, and professional networks that have driven the field beyond its institutional frameworks.
Edited by Heidi Kurvinen (University of Bergen) and Emil Eiby Seidenfaden (University of Copenhagen), the issue People and Networks in the History of Nordic Journalism challenges the long-dominant top-down and content-focused approach to media history. Despite analytical developments internationally, Nordic scholarship, the guest editors note, “has often privileged institutional perspectives and remained confined within national borders.” Addressing this gap in the Nordic context, the latest issue of Journalistica shifts the spotlight to the everyday labour and agency of newsworkers, placing the journalists and editors who create media content at the centre of analysis.
The idea for the volume emerged in the aftermath of the 2024 symposium “Actor-driven Approaches to the History of Journalism”, organised at the University of Copenhagen, and from the observation that Nordic journalism history “did not include much discussion of individual agency, even though individuals and their networks undoubtedly shape media history in multiple ways.”This issue aims to fill that gap. The authors examine newsworkers as active agents whose professional choices, collaborations, and creative practices helped shape the media landscape. As Kurvinen and Seidenfaden note, “the history of the media does not exist without the people who produced the content and made it consumable to newspaper and magazine readers, as well as television watchers and radio listeners.”
All the articles in the special issue contribute to understanding agency in journalism history, focusing on the interpersonal relationships, or “relational agency”, that influences individual newsworkers, the audience, as well as who is represented in the news and how they are framed:
– Sorvali & Hänninen use an intersectional lens to show how the success of two early Finnish women’s magazines depended on the social and personal factors shaping their founders’ lives.
– Engren and Jarlbrink combine micro and macro perspectives in journalism history, showing how a biographical approach may deepen the analysis made by distant reading of media material. The authors show how editor Isidor Kjellberg helped connect Swedish emigrants in America with readers in Sweden.
– Ackerley, Åsén Ekstrand, Aare – in three different articles – explore the relationship between journalistic practices, ideals, and individual autonomy, showing how journalists’ work reflects broader social and ideological contexts.
– Jørndrup, Willig, Blach-Ørsten, & Bengtsson trace how obituaries and biographical notices in Danish newspapers reveal changing gender patterns, with modern texts portraying women more often through family roles.
Traditionally – and in this issue – contributions to media historical research are from both media scholars and historians. “While the dialogue between the contributions may not always be explicit, we hope this special issue will encourage future collaboration and strengthen the shared ground between media scholars and historians,” say the guest editors.