Studying Religion in Nordic Newspapers: An Introduction

This article introduces the topic of this special issue: religion in Nordic
newspapers. It provides a general framework for the following four
articles based on a longitudinal study of religion in Danish, Finnish,
Norwegian, and Swedish newspapers by clarifying what characterizes
selected ‘Nordic’ countries, their media spheres, and their religious
landscapes. Furthermore, this article suggests that despite significant
changes in the media sphere, including factual media production and
consumption, there are good reasons to study religion-related media
content produced by the dominant and conventional media outlets,
including newspapers. However, this should not be done by isolating
newspapers from society and the rest of the media. This introduction
and the following articles therefore propose that the selected key
concepts and debates among sociologists of religion are particularly
useful in thinking about religion-related newspaper content.