Julia Sonnevend

Iconic Rituals: Towards a Social Theory of Encountering Images

Images are fellow travelers in time: they are permanent residents in our lives. We look at images in our homes, we see them on the surfaces of urban environments, and we encounter them in old and new media spheres. When we look at images, we “meet” them and engage in a complex game of distance and closeness. We search for familiarity and for difference; we enjoy the meeting or wish to forget it immediately. We try to understand the image by interpretation, but the encounter is far from being only rational: it also has a mysterious and unpredictable chemistry. Similar to looking at people, we frequently look at images, and on a very few occasions, we fall in love with them.

The shifting temporalities of journalism: In memory of Kevin Barnhurst:

This Special Issue of Journalism grows out of the ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Journalism Studies’ panel organized by Henrik Bødker and Julia Sonnevend at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Puerto Rico (May 2015). The panel, entitled Shifting Temporalities of Journalism, sought to investigate how temporalities are constructed by journalistic texts, technologies and the consumption of journalism in diverse cultural settings. While links between journalism and time are often acknowledged, there is a sense, says Rantanen (2009), in which the ‘temporality of news has been neglected, or taken for granted, in academic research’; perhaps, she says, ‘because it is considered too obvious’ (1; emphasis in the original). Indeed, apart from recent work on journalism and memory, as well as ongoing discussions of speeded-up news cycles, an explicit focus on temporality has largely been missing from journalism studies. This Special Issue intends to further research on temporality by bringing together innovative work on how temporalities are constructed by texts, technologies, processes of globalization and contexts of production and consumption. Journalism constitutes a series of interrelated practices for the social construction of time. It arrests the ordinary and the unusual in various forms of texts that create feelings of simultaneity, help define the contemporary, outline possible futures, and shape our understanding and memories of the past. Digital technologies allow journalism an

Interruptions of time: The coverage of the missing Malaysian plane MH370 and the concept of ‘events’ in media research

The article makes a case for foregrounding ‘event’ as a key concept within journalism studies before, during, and after the digital age. The article’s first part presents an overview of the existing research on events in philosophy, sociology, historiography, and journalism studies, arguing that the concept of ‘event’ has not received sufficient attention in journalism studies. The article’s second part demonstrates the need to consider ‘event’ as an essential concept of journalism studies through an empirical case study: the news coverage of the disappeared Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 (8 March 2014) in four American news outlets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. This article argues that journalists employed two strategies in their coverage: (1) they created and/or covered what the article calls ‘substitute events’, defined as minor events in the present that journalists perceived as new happenings and that led to further reporting and (2) turned to the past and the future for events in their reporting, extending the scope of coverage from the relatively eventless present. Overall, the case study shows that journalists are limited in their narration by the power of events, and they are eager to construct and cover events, even when events are not readily available.

The lasting charm of Media Events

This essay analyzes the power, charm and limitations of Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard, 1992). It argues that the book presented a uniquely compelling and alluring concept, but has three limitations: Media Events has a present-centric view of events, a constrained understanding of conflicting narratives in the global context, and it is inattentive to how media events travel across multiple platforms. But overall, this essay concludes that ceremonial media events as described by the canonic book of Dayan and Katz are still important in the 21st century, and will survive the passing of time and media.

Media events today

Introduction to the Special Section on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.