Inside, outside, and beyond media logic: journalistic creativity in climate reporting

Abstract

In order to accomplish more multi-dimensional analyses of media logic one needs to study how journalists grapple with news issues in their expanding development, such as the revolutionary development of the climate issue in the news. The present analysis is based on interviews with 14 Swedish environmental journalists from various news media, who have been part of editorial concentrations on climate news. The results consist of three ways of conceptualizing the climate issue among the journalists: as inside, outside, and beyond media logic. These conceptualizations give rise to three conflicting types of journalistic creativity, more precisely, the ability to effectively insert the climate issue ‘into’ media logic; the ability to go as far ‘outside’ media logic as possible while remaining credible by arraying the climate issue in ‘scientific language’; and finally, the ability to think beyond the media-logic ‘box’ and do something about it (to change journalism).