Il ruolo della donna all’interno del movimento di liberazione

This section presents an overview of Danish research and literature on cultural jour-nalism. It emphasises two approaches, namely academic research, including historical accounts of the press, and practitioners’ perspectives. Though to some extent anecdotal and polemical, the practitioners’ perspectives exemplify some of the more theoretical research perspectives, and are therefore important supplements in their own right.

Academic research:

historical and longitudinal studies of cultural journalism

For a long time, the larger press-historical accounts examined cultural journalism as one (minor) element of the broader historical transformations of the form and content of the news media. This was the case with Søllinge and Thomsen’s bibliography and register of Danish newspapers (1988-1991) and Jensen’s four volumes on Danish Media History, covering the years 1840 to 2015 (2001-2016). Of particular importance to the study of cultural journalism is the outline of the reform of Danish newspapers from party press to omnibus over the course of the twentieth century, and of the introduc-tion of public service broadcasting. As part of this transformaintroduc-tion, Danish newspapers broadened their selection of content to include, in addition to politics and literature, news, culture broadly speaking, lifestyle, everyday life, etc. In this period, public service became a cornerstone not only of the professional approach to journalism in Denmark more generally, but also of the prioritisation and interpretation of culture.

This way, parts of the broader press and media historical accounts also address the media’s coverage of and approach to art and culture, though not in detail.

Still, as with journalism studies in general, cultural journalism research is a fairly recent field in Denmark. Since the early 1970s, media studies have included news and journalism as part of their topics of scrutiny (e.g. Mortensen 1972, Siune 1982), but journalism studies only became a more distinct field of research in the late 1990s, among other things with the introduction of academic journalism study programmes.

Over the past 15 years, scholarship has primarily been dominated by political journal-ism. This has included the institutional, technological and professional context of the production, content, and use of news and journalism. Media and journalism scholars have conducted this research for the most part, political scientists to a lesser degree (Kristensen & Blach-Ørsten 2015). Due to the predominance of interest in news media and journalists’ operationalisation of their ideal roles as a fourth estate and their contribution to the political public sphere, issues such as culture, lifestyle, and consumption have been somewhat neglected.

However, since the early 1990s and especially the 2000s, research has emerged in Denmark, both on art and culture as distinct fields of journalism and on cultural journalists and critics as distinct types of journalists or communicators of culture.

Unlike Norwegian studies in the same period (e.g. Bech-Karlsen 1991, Lund 2005),

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this research has not taken as its point of departure that cultural journalism has been in decline due to commercialisation and decreasing aesthetic contemplation of art for art’s sake. Because of the lack of systematic analyses of journalists’ approach to culture, Danish scholars have instead applied more descriptive methodologies in order to examine what cultural journalism is, how the field can be conceptualised theoreti-cally, and how the production and content of cultural journalism have changed in light of cultural, societal, and media-related transformations (e.g. Jørgensen 1991, 1994;

Kristensen 2003, 2010; Kristensen & From 2011). This research has mostly focused on the printed press and on the cultural review as genre.

One of the pioneers in this field is literary scholar John Chr. Jørgensen, who has studied literary critique and has also worked as a literary critic (at Politiken and the tabloid Ekstra Bladet) and, this way, combines academic and practice-based approaches.

He has published a range of books on cultural journalism and cultural critique since the 1980s that can, roughly, be divided into three approaches. First, he has produced handbooks and research on the genres of cultural journalism. Of particular scholarly importance is his dissertation of 1994, which analyses the development of the Dan-ish literary review during the nineteenth century. His handbook on the genres of the cultural pages (1991) has been widely used in academic teaching and at media schools.

Second, he has authored books on the style and language of cultural journalism in general (e.g. 2007) and reviews more specifically (e.g. 1999). And third, Jørgensen has over the long term studied significant Danish cultural critics and journalists by portray-ing, for example, author and journalist Lise Nørgaard (2014), author and journalist Klaus Rifbjerg (1995), and critic, journalist, and author Herman Bang (2003), while also providing a register with 146 biographies of cultural critics (1992) as well as a book on noteworthy female journalists during the past 100 years (2012). Even though this last work is an analysis of female journalists in general rather than female cultural journalists specifically, it outlines a period of journalism in transition (especially af-ter the Second World War) during which the cultural pages and consumer maaf-terial changed radically (Jørgensen 2012). While these tendencies are not exclusively bound to how women have increasingly become journalists, it is noteworthy how many fe-male journalists have worked with ‘soft news’ and pioneered as well as broadened the perspectives of cultural journalism. This way, with more than 20 published works on journalists and journalism, and cultural journalism and cultural critics in particular, John Chr. Jørgensen is one of the early prominent scholars in his field. He paved the way for a new research agenda on cultural journalism in Denmark.

One feature of the journalistic ‘turn’ in Danish media studies in the early 2000s was increasing interest among media scholars in scrutinising cultural journalism.

Kristensen (2003), for example, used surveys and qualitative interviews to investigate the increasing professionalisation of the cultural industries’ interplay with the news media. Her study points to cultural journalists having distinctively different concep-tions of their societal role and obligaconcep-tions than other types of journalists (see also Forde 2003, Harries & Wahl-Jorgensen 2007), since they are closely intertwined with

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their sources from the cultural industries and act as cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu 1984) between cultural producers and cultural audiences rather than as autonomous, critical watchdogs (see also Kristensen & From 2015a, 2015b; Marshall 2009).

In the late 2000s, on the basis of a mixed methods approach, Kristensen and From conducted a large-scale study on the historical transformations of the coverage of art and culture in the Danish press 1890-2008 and on the production and reception of contemporary cultural journalism (From 2010, Kristensen 2010, Kristensen & From 2011, 2012). Their studies apply three perspectives that may serve to indicate how changes in cultural journalism are part of broader cultural and societal transforma-tions. First, they took a broad approach to the concept of ‘culture’ in order to show how cultural change in light of globalisation (Janssen et al. 2008, 2011; Knapskog

& Larsen 2008) has transformed the conception of art, culture, and aesthetics, and how cultural journalism as a part of the media and cultural industry has reflected, but also influenced this change. A second approach was to use mediatization as a theoretical concept that might help to explain how the increasing independence and commercialisation of the news media during the second part of the twentieth century has influenced and changed not only the interaction of media and cultural institutions (Hjarvard 2008, 2013), but also the interplay of media and audiences. Third, they addressed the professional transformation of cultural journalism in light of media institutional and technological changes during the twentieth century. These three, interlinked types of structural transformation seem to suggest that the professional cultural journalist today wins authority by way of three coexisting, but potentially also competing types of professionalism (Kristensen & From 2015c). The first of these is an organisational professionalism dominated by media logics (cf. Örnebring 2009), prioritising the efficient and commercially sound production of cultural journalism by cultural journalists who cover various cultural areas and produce ‘news you can use’ on art and culture to several platforms. The second type of professionalism is an occupational professionalism that is dominated by the logics of news journalism, where cultural journalists apply a critical, investigative, original and independent approach to the coverage of culture. The third type is an aesthetic specialisation, as coined by Hellman & Jaakkola (2012), whereby cultural journalists approach art and culture on art and culture’s own terms, rather than on the terms of media logic or the logics of news journalism.

In addition to these somewhat systematic approaches, other scholars have in single publications – in books or in scholarly articles – addressed cultural journalism and topics associated with this specialised type of journalism. Cultural critique and the cultural review as genre have been a particular focus of attention. To mention a few, the reviewing of theatre and literature as critical practice has been addressed from various perspectives by, for example, Bredsdorff, Jørgensen, and Klysner (1983) and Svendsen (2013), while Schepelern (1995) outlined the critical discussions of film in Denmark during the twentieth century in various institutional settings (e.g. in the art world, in politics, in academia, and in the press). Parts of Teilmann’s more recent (2010) book

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on cultural life also address culture in the news media, though not based on systematic analyses. Celebrity news in Denmark has been studied by Sparre and Kabel (2001), who point to two aspects of importance to contemporary cultural journalism: first, that Danish celebrity journalism has become increasingly intertwined with cultural journalism (see also Marshall 2009), and, second, that celebrities are increasingly important in the marketing and circulation of cultural products, including cultural journalism (see also Kristensen 2016).

Though not definitive, this outline of recent Danish research on cultural journal-ism illustrates that the field has been the object of attention of scholars across various humanistic disciplines. At the same time, it constitutes a new topic on the research agenda of journalism and media studies, which in recent years have provided more systematic and consistent approaches. That development also means that a more varied set of methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and focus areas have been applied since the turn of the millennium.

Practitioners’ perspectives and the public debate

Practitioners from the cultural circuits have also contributed to the recurring public debate in Denmark on the state of cultural journalism. What characterises this debate is a somewhat critical tone that in many ways mirrors, but also supports the three competing types of professionalism outlined above within cultural journalism: the journalistic logic or news paradigm, the aesthetic paradigm, and the media logic. In order to emphasise the interplay of research and practice, we highlight in what fol-lows three contemporary voices in the public debate on cultural journalism, which exemplify these three types of professionalisms.

One voice, representing the journalistic logic, is Lasse Marker.¹¹ In 2014 he pub-lished a short polemical book with the telling title Six Reasons Why Nothing Worth a Damn is Happening in Danish Cultural Life (authors’ translation). In it, he uses his own experiences as a producer of cultural journalism to castigate Danish cultural journalists for running the errands of the cultural industry. He argues that cultural journalists should conduct independent, investigative journalism like traditional news reporters, for example by looking more deeply into the public and private funding of art and culture, rather than fraternising with the cultural industries. Marker’s ar-gument should be understood in the context of the numerous subsidy schemes and institutions that exist to facilitate art and culture in the Danish welfare state. The state spends around 13 billion DKK (1.7 billion EUR) on public funding of culture every year (or approximately 1 percent of the total yearly public expenses in Denmark; see Hjorth-Andersen 2013: 347). Research, however, shows that cultural politics and the allocation of subsidies for art and culture do not have a high priority in Danish cultural journalism (Kristensen 2003, 2016; Kristensen & From 2011). So, Marker exemplifies the occupational professionalism and journalistic logic of cultural journal-ism by regarding cultural journaljournal-ism as, first and foremost, news journaljournal-ism, but also

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by sidestepping defining aspects of this specialised type of journalism. For example, viewing the political aspects of cultural journalism as mainly connected to political institutions may be a somewhat strict approach that does not take ‘the political’ in culture and everyday life into account (Riegert et al. 2015). Furthermore, Marker largely disregards the cultural review as a genre, which in many ways contradicts the history of cultural journalism, since the review has played an important role as a distinct and formative genre.¹²

Representing another position in the public debate, Anne Middelboe Christensen¹³ subscribes to the aesthetic paradigm and focuses primarily on the genre of cultural reviews (see, in particular, her semi-academic book Enthusiasm and Brutality, 2012, authors’ translation). She argues that professional cultural journalism and critique are important to democracy but that it must take its point of departure in academic knowl-edge of the particular cultural subfield under review (i.e. in aesthetic specialisation;

see also Hellman & Jaakkola 2012) in order to provide a basis for qualified discourse on art and culture. So, she is concerned about the position of the cultural critic in contemporary journalism, because she finds that journalistic logics favour other genres (interviews and reportages) at the expense of aesthetic critique (Christensen 2012:

43). Scholarly research can, indeed, confirm a changing genre focus, since portraits and interviews have come more to the fore in cultural journalism (Kristensen & From 2011). But it cannot unequivocally confirm that cultural criticism, epitomised in the review, has become marginalised, even though cultural reviews are more prominent in some news media than in others and have become more service-oriented (Kristensen 2009, 2016; Kristensen & From 2011). This way in contrast to Marker, Christensen exemplifies the aesthetic approach to cultural journalism in general (and to reviewing or cultural critique more specifically) by emphasising the need to critically debate art and culture on their own terms, rather than on the terms of news journalism.

A third voice in the current public debate belongs to Christian Have, a public rela-tions agent over many years for various Danish cultural institurela-tions and producers.

On the basis of practical experience, Have has published several books on cultural promotion by means of, among other channels, the news media, and so his approach exemplifies the organisational or media-logical approach to cultural journalism. His main argument – and the title of two of his books (2004, 2012) – is that Visibility is Existence; this is, that cultural producers and artists need to adapt to the logics of the media to become visible and gain public attention. In this way, Have echoes media research that points to media visibility and mediatization as significant tendencies across all areas of contemporary society (e.g. Hjarvard 2013, Thompson 2005) and in the cultural public sphere as well. Though Have applies a cross-media perspective, he does view the news media as the “real power in society and in the media universe”

(Have 2012: 69, authors’ translation), pointing to the continued importance of cultural journalism in cultural promotion in a media landscape of many platforms and com-munication channels. He exemplifies how the logics of the cultural industries and the media intertwine, since the cultural industries develop cultural events adapted to the

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criteria of cultural journalism and specific media, while cultural journalism (mainly) covers cultural events supporting the media institution’s cultural brand.

While the first two voices apply critical approaches to cultural journalism, though from very different positions, by arguing why and how it should submit more to the logics of journalism or more to the logics of aesthetic contemplation, the third voice assumes a middle-ground position that recognises how cultural journalism is both news and aesthetic reflection – more news in some media contexts, more reflection in others.