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In a climate of growing public concern and monitoring of business's impact on the environment, corporations and industry groups have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their environmental reputation and to influence the outcome of environmental debates in the public sphere. In this article, we provide an exploratory overview of how the largest Swedish corporations selectively subsidise environmental news-making by supplying it with promotional materials disguised as journalistic copy. We analyse a year's worth of public relations output from the largest 15 companies traded in the Stockholm exchange or owned by the Swedish state, in order to shed light on the environmental themes they cover, the techniques they adopt to maximise the likelihood of media coverage and the evidence they provide to support their claims. Our analysis shows that corporate voices make substantial use of environmental and ecological arguments in their strategic communication, but they provide little useful information about the company's impact and do not usually foster forms of dialogic stakeholder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Crisis communication is a growing field of research and practice. A weakness in the traditional research field is the lack of theoretical development and the isolated sender and mass communication focus. In the present paper, we challenge traditional research by focusing on the contemporary cultural and ethnic diversity in society from an audience-oriented media perspective. In the paper, we review earlier research on multicultural crisis communication. The discussion is based on secondary data on multicultural media use in Sweden and an Internet analysis focused on dialogue and community building. All together, the review and secondary data show that persons of foreign origin in Sweden have high access to ICT. This is an argument for directing crisis communication not only through traditional mass media, but also through new media. This is not only because of the simple reach of these channels, but also because of the increase in the quality and dialogue potential of these "great good places" (Oldenburg, 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The research applies media discourse analysis and late modernity theory to the social construction of the trans-national Öresund Region between the South of Sweden and East of Denmark. Based on interviews with PR sources and journalists, analysis of newspaper texts and opinion polls, the study found that despite trans-national aims the region is mainly constructed through Swedish or Danish national perspectives. It was also found that as a news management strategy, the factual strategy, emphasizing logical arguments and the production of reports, surveys, analysis, books and seminars aimed towards opinion elites, has been most successful. The communicated region is dominated by a national growth discourse where regional political-economical elites support local and national growth prior to other values. The media formation of the Öresund Region is dominated by elite actors and has an auto-communicative character. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]