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Professional economists wield considerable power as experts and policymakers. Consequently, economists frequently appear in the media, where they comment on current economic issues and assess economic policy options. Despite the status of economists, little is known about the relationship between economists and the media and how economists use the media to promote economic and political interests. Building on the scholarship on the mediatization of expertise, this article analyzes the mediatization of the economist profession. The article draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with Finnish economists who appear frequently in the news media. The findings reveal how institutions from private banks to research institutes use economists to advance their economic and political interests via the media. It is found that using social media and serving journalists are elemental parts of an economist's job description. Furthermore, economists work closely with communications professionals to advance organizational interests. This article argues that further research should analyze how mediatization intertwines with the work of economic experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores datawalking as a novel method in media and communication research for studying datafication. Drawing from existing literature, datawalking is characterized as an embodied, situated and generative practice. These affordances of walking help to tackle existing research challenges and connect lived experiences to data infrastructural concerns. More specifically, contemporary research on the deep mediatized city faces challenges that pertain to the invisibility, loss of context and access to data and its infrastructures. It is argued that datawalks, as an empirical method in media and communication research, offers a much-needed anchoring of data as material and situated, and constitutive of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election coverage has a tendency to frame politics as a strategic game, to increase the role of journalists as interpreters of issues and events and to include a conflict frame, and thus indicating increased mediatization. However, political news research outside of the election indicates that news media are less independent from political actors. Drawing on literature on mediatization, media interventionism, political news journalism, news framing and source use, the purpose of this article is to empirically investigate whether election coverage is representative of other political journalism in terms of degree of mediatization. The study is based on a systematic comparison of three content analyses using the same coding schedule and procedure from coverage of the Financial Crisis 2008, the Election Campaign 2010 and routine political news coverage 2012 in Sweden. The main conclusion from this study is that mediatization of media coverage is substantially influenced by the specific context of the news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When various media in their entirety mark how we articulate our social worlds, we need an approach of mediatization research that reflects this transmediality. To develop such an approach, the article first discusses the ‘institutionalist’ and ‘social-constructivist’ traditions of mediatization research. Both traditions concur in their understanding of mediatization as being a concept to capture the interrelation between the change of media and communication on the one hand, and the change of culture and society on the other hand. Taking this as a foundation it becomes possible to reflect on the role of certain media as ‘moulding forces’, i.e. as certain institutionalizations and reifications of communication. Such a conceptual reflection offers the chance to view the mediatization process as the change of transmedial communicative figurations by which we construct our mediatized worlds. Based on this theoretical foundation, the article subsequently reflects a twofold operationalization, i.e. as diachronous and synchronous mediatization research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The link between mass media systems and politics is widely acknowledged and has been confirmed by a significant amount of research. However, the degree of this tie and the forms that it can take vary significantly according to different national contexts. By conducting a comparative analysis that is centred on three cases in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, this study addresses the overlap between media and politics from a dual perspective: the politicization of public service broadcasting and the permeability of the political system for media-related personalities or practitioners. The data show that the natural connection between political and media systems is never completely absent, although profound differences can be detected in the extent and in the implications that these connections can have for the entire system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent analysis of interactions and relations between media, individuals and organizations is commonly based on the notion of mediatization. Research in journalism and media studies, political studies as well as business studies has explored mediatization as prevailing transformation influencing communication activities of individuals as well as organizations. In the field of organizational studies an increasing interest has been paid to the mediatized settings in which organizations conduct their activities. But despite the growing interest we still lack a sufficient understanding of the inner dynamics of these processes. Contemporary research often focuses on the effects of mediatization and, therefore, relatively little is known about how agents are involved in the creation, maintenance, reshaping and interruption of the institutional properties of mediatization. This article seeks to examine the dynamics of mediatization and how it is shaped, reproduced and reshaped through activities of individual corporations. The aim of the article is to show how mediatization evokes processes of skilful and purposeful activities of actors involved in the creation, maintenance and disturbance of the shared rules, norms and practices that guide organizations in their effort to deal with media-related issues. The article, therefore, goes beyond examining the media activities of individual organizations as a result of mediatization, and focuses on these activities as a constituent of the processes in which mediatization is reconstructed and enacted. The analysis is based on a study of 13 Swedish publicly listed corporations and their media activities. The material was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces mediatization in the coverage of election campaigns in Danish and German television news over the past 20 years (1990–2009). The analysis is based on news content analyses focusing on the major candidates in the two countries. Considering that Denmark and Germany are similar but nevertheless different countries, the data show remarkable similarities in the coverage of elections and how it changes over time. Observing the amount of horse-race coverage, personalization, visualization and negativity, most findings fitted the mediatization hypothesis at a first glance. At a second glance, multivariate analyses controlling for important other variables confirmed the notion of mediatization for only three of the five content indicators studied. In addition, the mediatization process apparently stalled in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mediatization of politics in general, and of election campaigns in particular, seems to be an obvious consequence of media changes during recent decades and of an increasing interdependence between political processes and mass communication. As in many other European countries, three trends mark such development in Germany: (1) an enormous expansion of supply of new types of media and content genres, (2) the growing importance of television in political communication and (3) the transformation of election campaigning. Based on election studies and content analysis data, this article examines these changes with regard to their impact on voter behaviour. The article looks for evidence of voter mobilization, television dependency and personalization trends, and discusses potential consequences of a changing campaign style. The findings support and, at the same time, modify some implications of the mediatization hypothesis. They concur with recent scepticism about the notion of Americanization. The article discusses the results with reference to changes in campaigning strategies, e.g. tendencies towards the secularization of election research having repercussions on research concepts and results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]