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

Sammanfattning: 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.