From Ivory Tower to Twitter: Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture

Mapping heterogeneous cultural critics

by Nete Nørgaard Kristensen & Unni From 

This subproject provides a quantitative survey of who is currently performing the role as cultural critic in Danish news media, their editorial position, and the basis of their authority and expertise.

Within the journalistic field (Benson & Neveu 2004, Bourdieu 1996) culture continues to represent a prestigious domain (Hovden et al. 2009, 2014, 2015), and cultural critics are attentive of their institutional brand-value and public esteem (Harries & Wahl-Jørgensen 2007, Kristensen & From 2011, 2015). At the same time, they fight for editorial resources and status, since economic, social and media meta-capital increasingly surpasses cultural capital (Couldry 2013, Hovden & Knapskog 2008, 2015), and nonprofessionals (Elkins 2003, Verboord 2014) and generalists (Dahlgren 2012) challenge their authority and impact.

Aiming to display their heterogeneity, the quantitative survey (Bryman 2012) charts Danish cultural critics in print/online newspapers, radio, and television; their number, conditions and history of employment, education, tasks, etc., accompanied by semi-structured, expert-interviews (Bogner et al. 2009, Bruun 2014) with cultural editors and critics, providing qualitative insights into self-perceptions of roles, authority, and influence.

Thus, mapping the field of cultural journalists and critics in the contemporary media landscape, this sub-project provides background information to the other six sub-projects, each looking into specific types of critics within the proposed, four-sided typology of 'the heterogeneous cultural critic' , and/or the critical content and debate they produce within specific cultural fields or on specific media platforms.