Richard Baerug University of Tartu

Advertising-based Journalism Discourse in MICE magazines

The objective of this paper is to study the possible impact of advertising on journalism in the key MICE (meeting, incentives, conferences and events) magazines in Europe and beyond partly by applying text and discourse analysis. By applying various methods the author tries to reveal journalism and journalistic reports that are based upon or linked to advertising as well as to identify indicators of this advertising link in journalistic texts. An analysis of answers given by the advertising departments in MICE magazines to a potential buyer of advertising frequently identifies a practice where journalism is based upon and linked to advertising as well as a situation with considerable discrepancies between professional media norms and actual media behaviour Usage of the favourable word index (FWI) identifies the genre where the differences among the MICE magazines are seen in a most overt manner. The application of text and discourse analysis on a representative selection of texts in this genre confirms the correlations revealed between the answers given and the FWI and shows how discursive elements of advertising are integrated in the journalistic discourse.


Andres Jõesaar Tartu University

Formation of Estonian Broadcasting Landscape 1994-2006: Experience of the Transition State

Impact of the EU broadcasting legislation on the Estonian television broadcasting in 1994-2006. Based on several researches and media surveys (MEEMA , Shein , Jõesaar ), the article analyses impact of EU legal framework on Estonian television landscape during 1994-2006. In focus are the relations between changes in broadcasting legislation, trends in TV consumption and economical development of industry.

Implementation of Television Without Frontiers directive and amendment of Broadcasting Act in 2001 recast Estonian broadcasting landscape. Estonian legislation has been supportive of securing the position for two foreign players (Schibsted and MTG), leaving public service broadcaster without sufficient funding and imposing its remits.

Favourable conditions for private sector have not lead into wider program offering. On the contrary - research shows that the number of different program categories offered by private broadcasters has decreased. TWF European works quota does not have positive influence on program cultural variety. At the same time PsB, being the only channel meeting TWF quotas, is facing continous audience decrease.

Analysis of financial results of private channels shows that the profit gained from substantial growth of TV advertising market is not invested back into production.

Despite of deficit financing and other limitations, public service broadcaster has maintained its leading role as most trusted information source for the Estonian society. Can this role be maintained in the digital era?

Missing private sectors interest to invest and ambition, but lack of financial resources of PsB, have postponed launch of digital terrestrial television until year 2007. To meet European Commission’s recommendation for analogue switch off by year 2012, the switch over period should be less than five years.

It will be a challenge for the whole broadcasting sector.


Maria Jufereva Tartu University

Representing minority: Role perceptions of Russophone journalists in Estonia

In Estonia, 121 professional Russian speaking journalists were surveyed using face-to-face interviews and standartized questionnaires to establish their basic demographic and social characteristics as well as their views on professional values and role perceptions. The findings suggest that after Estonia regained independence in 1991 two generations of Russophone journalists in Estonia appeared whose attitude to professional values and role perceptions differ. Since 1991 position of Russian speaking journalists changed – they found themselves in the position of journalists of the minority. Russian speaking journalists of different age groups and educational level have different ideas about representing “minority question“ in the Estonian Russophone media. While younger journalists see themselves more as neutral and objective transmitters of the news, journalists from the older generation frequently answered that they represent and stand for interests of the Russian minority and try to influence societal development in this sphere. The main tendency indicates, however, that the majority of Russian speaking journalists consider „promoting integration into Estonian society among their audience” not important. Russophone journalists also think that they cannot much influence the decisions of the Estonian political elite. In terms of education and training only one third of Russian speaking journalists has higher education in journalism.

Key words: Russophone journalists, professional values, role perceptions, integration, minority journalism, generation differences.


Aurelija Juodyte Doctoral student in mass media Vilnius University, Institute of Journalism

Role of Public communication: does it serve for imitation or implementation of civil participation?

The paper will look at communicative activities of various public figures including political leaders, journalists, public institutions and nongovernmental organizations. The aim of the paper is to find out how the civic participation is implemented by mentioned bodies. The examination of forms of communication taken and tendencies of media coverage will show application of conveyance standards formulated in White paper on EU communication politics as well as will disclose main characteristics of informative and investigative journalism in Lithuania.

The specific focus will be given to investigation of communicative practices of public institutions, comparing them to the western and eastern social propaganda models. The paper will also take in consideration such problematic questions as: • How do civic initiatives originate? • What impact do they have on political decisions? • How do mass media cover civic initiatives? • In what ways can citizens take part in public communication and evoke public discussions on certain topics of public concern? • How civil rights topics come into both public and political agenda in Lithuania?

Theoretic reflections will be illustrated by examples of recent practice of public communication.


Tiiu Kreegipuu University of Tartu, Estonia

The media history of a totalitarian society – how to research the Soviet period of Estonian journalism.

The media system in the occupied Baltic States during the years 1940-1991 had to function in the conditions of a totalitarian society. The historical research of the media in Estonia during the years of the Soviet occupation raises several theoretical and methodological questions, as the media channels were handled as the tools of the Soviet propaganda.

My research is focused on the Soviet Estonian newspapers. I am trying to find out how the Soviet media system was introduced in Estonia, which were the ideological goals of the journalism and how the newspapers were turned into the weapons of the Communist Propaganda. The most intriguing questions are: how to read the Soviet newspapers today, which theoretical and methodological approaches could be used to find out how the press was communicating with the society, how were the newspapers as propaganda vehicles supposed to function from the standpoint of the Soviet ideologists and to what extent the propagandistic goals were achieved in reality. As the Soviet newspapers were written in the ideological political discourse rather than in a journalistic one, the methods of textual analysis can lead us to interesting results. I have come to conclusions, that methods like discourse analysis could be used rather effectively. It's wide scale of methodological and analytical approaches reveal much not just about the current discourse or text but about the media system and totalitarian society in general.


Roosmarii Kurvits Tartu University

The Outward Appearance of Estonian Newspapers 1806–1940 and Mervola’s Appearance Spiral

Pekka Mervola (Kirja, kirjavampi, sanomalehti; 1995) has divided history of outward appearance of Finnish newspapers into four eras: the era of book typography, of the corset, of parading pages, and of modules. To explain the changes of the eras, Mervola has created a model – the appearance spiral. He says that the appearance of newspaper is a reflection of the volume of newspaper’s contents. The increase in the volume of contents creates pressure on the previous appearance of newspapers. When the volume of contents has tripled from the time of the onset of the period, there arises a need to rearrange the contents and the appearance of newspapers.

On the other hand, the volume of contents is influenced by the social and economic situation. The aims of this paper are: • to find the main periods in the appearance of Estonian newspapers from the first Estonian language newspaper (1806) up to the Soviet occupation (1940) and their main characteristics; • to explore two problems: – do periods of the appearance of Finnish and Estonian newspapers correspond to each other; – is it possible to use Mervola’s appearance spiral to explain the changes of periods of appearance of Estonian newspapers.

My main method is content analysis. My data come from three Estonian central newspapers at an interval of five years. At least 12 issues (weekly papers) or 6 issues (daily papers) were included each year.


Anu Leinonen University of Helsinki

Name even one: Kurds in Turkish mainstream press

In August 2005 Turkish Prime minister Erdoğan acknowledged the existence of a Kurdish problem in Turkey and stated that the primary bond that unites all residents of the country is the citizenship of the Republic of Turkey. This implied acceptance of the legitimacy of various ethnic sub-national identities. Expectedly, Erdoğan's comment fired yet another round in the public and scholarly debate on the Turkish national identity. What binds the people of Turkey together? In what way should national, legal, political, ethnic, religious and cultural identities be combined?

Scholars had anticipated this public debate, seen as "a crisis of Turkish identity" or "an end of Kemalist certainty", which had been forming since the 1980s. It has been argued that the increasing visibility of alternative sources of identity, one of which is Kurdishness, created a need and an opportunity for a more pluralistic and inclusive redefinition of the nation.

In my paper I analyze the representations of Turkey's Kurds in the Turkish mainstream press. My study covers news reporting on selected news events related to the Kurds from late 1998 to 2005 (in Zaman, Sabah, Milliyet, Yeni Şafak, Cumhuriyet). The method used is a qualitative text analysis. The study is informed by constructionist philosophy of science: social reality, including national and ethnic identities, is seen to be constructed in interactive social practices through use of language. Media texts are prioritized because of media's central role in the creation of shared reality on the national level, and news articles are prioritized, since as "factual" pieces they have a special role in this creation of reality.

Based on my analysis of the mainstream press coverage of political issues related to the Kurds and the Kurdish issue, I argue that the increased visibility of the category Kurd/Kurdish (Kürt in Turkish) in Turkey (Cf. Somer 2005) has been rather abstract in nature. The word Kurd/Kurdish was used with increasing frequency and in more varied ways towards the end of the period studied, yet there were very few real persons or groups for whom the label Kurd was used. Especially in news, politically active individuals or organizations were not or perhaps could not be labeled as Kurdish.

In my opinion, the lack of concrete, real Kurdish persons and organizations openly classified as Kurdish points out that the ending of Kemalist modes of thinking, or Kemalist certainties, has been a much slower process than anticipated in the 1990s. I am also afraid, that the way the Kurds were portrayed in the press even in the 2000s, contributed little to the possibility of a more inclusive redefinition of Turkish citizenship and national identity.


Satu-Mari Korhonen IADE, Institute for Art, Development and Education Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki.

Development of a print media concept – longitudinal case study

The recent technological development enables the media organisations to distribute newspapers to various mediums simultaneously and this, on the other hand, challenges the current requirements and conditions of journalism. When renewing a newspaper and given it a new concept, it is crucial to bear in mind that media industries are operating in a dual-product marketplace where they first sell their content to readers and then these audiences to advertisers. On the other hand, given the historical background, journalist themselves see their own role as educators and therefore they often analyse the content of newspapers from a prospect of journalistic profession. This could be one reason why so many are reluctant to view newspapers as products. In order to create new concepts, it is important to support learning activities that will question previous traditions and customs.

With the development project called Media Concept Laboratory, we have been dealing with some concept development cases within the media sector. I have selected one of them as an object of study for my dissertation. I have been gathering multi-sited ethnography data since December 2006 and will continue until the end of 2007. The main purpose of my study is to find out how the newspaper production principles will evolve in the newsroom in the long run. Also, I will look into the present journalistic practises and their historical origins.


Reeta Pöyhtäri, M. Soc. Sc., Ph.D. student Department of Journalism and Mass Communication FIN-33014 University of Tampere Finland reeta.poyhtari@uta.fi

Conceptualising social identities of immigrant groups

Media discourses form one of those arenas in society, within which social relationships, identities and roles are negotiated and defined. By studying media texts and their definitions of social identities of ethnic groups, it is possible to gain information about relations between different ethnic groups in a multicultural society and the role of media in reproduction of these relations. These considerations also concern the way in which media promote or hinder social participation of different ethnic groups through representations in the media.

In my paper/presentation I would like to discuss a theoretical-methodological approach to the concept of social identity. Social identity is here believed to be the glue that binds group members together and marks some believed characteristics and values of a group, as well as it also marks differences between groups. The aim is to create an overall idea of the concept, in order to use it as a methodological tool to analysis of social identities of ethnic immigrant groups in media texts. The theoretical-methodological approach presented in the paper will be developed and tested further with case examples from my ongoing PhD-project that concerns the way in which identities of different immigrant groups and social relations (hierarchies) between immigrant groups are represented in various Finnish and Dutch magazines.


Indrek Treufeldt Tartu University

Interpretation of the EU Events in National Modality: A Qualitative Analysis of the EU Budget Debate Coverage in the British, German, French and Estonian Media

The paper examines national differences of meaning-production, regarding common EU events. It assumes that analyzing journalistic texts on the level of utterances we can reveal certain collective (national) modality in journalistic representation of social realities.

In the focus of the analysis are linguistic tools, which allow presenting certain ideas as objective and self-evident. Objectivation is a modality, which forms fixed areas in discourse. Those could be handled as reference points for journalistic interpretation. We try to prove that in the news coverage of EU-related events, usage of these linguistic tools for a specific /objectivation framing/ process is embedded in the national context of interpretation. National interpretation involves building relations with different actors and objects as well as acts realizing different discursive strategies (constructive, transformative and destructive).

Analysis is applied to texts covering EU December summit in 2005. EU heads of states gathered to discuss future budget of the Union for 2007-2013. The proposal submitted by the British government (then the presidency of the Union) was vividly criticized and different national positions were revealed and legitimized by media.

Near 100 newspaper texts from the UK, France, Germany and Estonia were analyzed.