Jonathan Samuelsson, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
Welcome to Humlab for this semester's third Tech Breakfast, this time as a physical event. Coffee and breakfast will be served from 8.00.
It is also possible to participate through ZOOM. Sign-up in the form below to receive the link to the meeting.
Abstract
In 1949, Expressen made Bernt Bernholm the first Swedish reporter to explicitly be named a medical journalist. Since then, all the major newspapers in Sweden have had designated medical journalists on staff, and medical journalism has become a genre of its own, common in all forms of mass media. Though central to medical policy, science and public opinion in the modern period, medical journalism in Sweden remains historically under-researched.
To be sure, the role of mass media in the shaping of medical ideas goes beyond the narrow genre of specialised medical journalism. Topic related to illness, medicine and health occur in almost every genre of journalism, from daily news and investigative features, to sports or culture and lifestyle sections. From an even wider perspective, including ads, TV guides et cetera, one is certainly justified in naming the media a key aspect of modern medical history.
In this session, I will briefly introduce an idea for a research project where I intend to study medical journalism in the post-war Swedish press. The idea is to study medical journalism both as a specialised journalistic practice and genre, by mapping medical journalists at Swedish daily newspapers and analysing their writing, and as a more ubiquitous presence in media discourse, using topic modelling and possibly other digital tools to investigate the use over time of keywords such as “medical”, “illness”, “health care” et cetera” in Swedish newspapers.