Rethinking cultural journalism in digital media

The boundaries of ‘cultural journalism’ are blurring in the digital media landscape. Public participation in debates about arts and culture has challenged the established notions of cultural authority, but also increased heterogeneity of cultural arbiters. 

The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is organizing a two-day conference which aims to address the new research questions arising:

• How can we conceptualize ‘cultural journalism’, ‘cultural critique’ and/or ‘the cultural journalist’/‘the cultural critic’ in contemporary media culture?
• How can we understand changing notions of authority and expertise in the cultural information circuit?
• How do newer digital media platforms (e.g., blogs/vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) influence, reproduce, challenge and transform cultural critique and its established genre conventions?
• What are the constituting genres of cultural journalism and cultural critique in the digital media landscape?
• What is the role of institutionalized news media, cultural journalism and cultural reviews in the mediation and valorization of culture today?
• What is the role and/or interplay of various types of (digital) media in producing and reproducing cultural journalists and critics?
• How does the increasing heterogeneity of cultural arbiters of taste in the digital media landscape influence and transform the production, form and content of cultural critique?
• Who are these heterogeneous critical voices and what characterizes their authority and expertise /as/ critical voices?
• What is the role of personality, emotionality and/or subjectivity in their critical work?
• How are cultural journalism and cultural critique positioned within the journalistic/editorial hierarchy of the news industry?
• Which media historical and structural changes have occasioned the contemporary heterogeneity of cultural critics in the media? 
• How do media systemic and/or, national/cross-national cultural contexts influence the performances and/or transformation of cultural journalism and cultural critique?

Abstracts (300-500 words and 100 word-bio) must be submitted by September 10, 2018 and sent to Nete Nørgaard Kristensen