Stockholm university
Denna sida på svenska

Torbjörn Rolandsson

About me

I hold a PhD in Journalism studies, and have written a dissertation on the Swedish public radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio, titled Playlist journalism: Algorithmic design, Automation and Journalistic practices at Sveriges Radio.

Research

In my thesis, I am interested in the interaction between journalistic practices and media formats, in connection with Sveriges Radios' increased reliance on online playlists for the distribution of news. Included in this process of change is the development of algorithmic systems to support automation, the datafication of practices such as news valuation, and novel ways of thinking about and producing digital sounds.

I collected data through technology-centered ethnographic observations of digital development and journalistic work at Sveriges Radio between 2018-2022, and unpack my data using format theory and cultural techniques.

My further academic interests include the automation of work, sound studies and science and technology studies.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Spellistejournalistik: En studie av algoritmisk design, automatisering och journalistiska praktiker på Sveriges Radio

    2023. Torbjörn Rolandsson.

    Thesis (Doc)

    This dissertation explores how a shift in the format of news distribution prompted changes in journalistic practices when the Public Service Media (PSM) organization Sveriges Radio (SR) started distributing news via digital playlists. Thereby, it provides much-needed empirical footing to the ongoing normative debates about how PSM should navigate a media landscape characterized by datafication, algorithmic technologies, and automation, in short, platformization.

    The shift in format, and the accompanying changes in practices, is studied through the theoretical lens of cultural techniques (Siegert, 2015a), with an emphasis on techniques for formatting (Sterne, 2012), classification, and standardization. The dissertation argues that such theories can be fruitful as they highlight the material aspects of journalistic practices (Ryfe, 2018), boundary work, and news valuation, which remain under-discussed in Journalism studies. Studying the role of techniques for formatting in journalism is proposed as especially productive; it gears attention towards media formats and how they, as boundary objects, articulate processes of distribution and production and cause previously distinct actors, sites, and ways of knowing to intermingle.

    A technographic (Bucher, 2012) methodology consisting of observations, interviews, and walkthroughs (Light et al., 2018) was applied at SR between 2018 and 2023. These methods encourage the study of often-overlooked actors highly relevant to how contemporary journalism is produced, like Content Management Systems (CMS) and the designers who shape their nudging features. The empirical chapters demonstrate how the development and implementation of the online playlists encompass the establishment, contestation, and dismantling of several journalistic boundaries. For example, an ambition with the playlists was to maintain the distinctiveness of SR as a public service organization in an online environment. However, by studying the practices actually employed to produce news for playlist distribution, the analysis shows that the boundary between practices for public service and commercial newswork often becomes turbid. For instance, managers use ideas surrounding the distracted digital news listener to encourage journalists to make their playlist news shorter, more to the point, and to a higher degree embellished with appealing environmental sounds. Meanwhile, how SR engaged with other aspects of the format, like digital data, could be seen as in some ways maintaining a distinction between PSM and commercial media. While most of the latter rely heavily on data produced by audience interactions to automate their online news flows, SR uses data generated by how editors classify news in the company CMS. Showing how datafication, algorithms, and automation work in non-commercial settings is an intervention that unsettles the totalizing discourses surrounding these phenomena that abound in Journalism studies.

    The study concludes by stating that, while normative discussions about the platformization of PSM are important, public service is what public service does. A significant part of what PSM does is developing various software formats to deal with platformization. It then follows that research interested in the digitization of PSM should take a greater interest in these formats and the techniques associated with their production and implementation.

    Read more about Spellistejournalistik

  • Politicians as entertainers-a political performance of the personal

    2020. Magnus Danielson, Torbjörn Rolandsson. Continuum. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 34 (5), 733-748

    Article

    Appearances on entertainment television constitute opportunities for politicians, not only to convey political messages, but also to perform personality. Most research has focused on the interview setting as the locus of such performances. But in addition to being interviewed, politicians occasionally turn entertainers themselves, dancing, singing, playing instruments or doing comedy. This article analyses such performances as a specific communicative practice that plays a part in the construction of public persona. The analysis is theory driven and based upon the concepts of personalization of politics, performativity and the carnivalesque.Our conclusion is that such performances have the potential to communicate emotive sociality, accentuate celebrity status, construct ordinariness and work as a pre-emptive inoculation against satire and ridicule. There is, however, also a risk to appear undignified and scrupulously populist involved, since the performances negotiate borders of political decency.

    Read more about Politicians as entertainers-a political performance of the personal

Show all publications by Torbjörn Rolandsson at Stockholm University

Edit the profile