I just came back from Bergen, Norway, that I revisited three months after the NordMedia23 conference. My actual revisit was, however, a decennial: it was precisely ten years ago I visited the city for the very first time to give a lecture on a theoretical model that would form the core of my doctoral thesis. The actual reason of my revisit was thus to revisit this model that has become to be known as the “dual-paradigm model” or “journalistification thesis” of cultural journalism.

The visit became a friendly gathering of the old Nordic cultural journalism researchers’ network, a group of journalism scholars from Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Professor Leif Ove Larsen from the University of Bergen had put together a compelling programme. Preceding the seminar open to everyone we had a half day focusing on ongoing research, where me and Professor Nete Nørgaard Kristensen from the University of Copenhagen presented ideas for future research, based on our previous work. The seminar Cultural journalism in the digital public sphere (Kulturjournalistikk i den digitale offentligheten), held mostly in Norwegian, gathered researchers and practitioners.

While there are several interesting directions of development in online publishing that can potentially pave the way for new trajectories in cultural journalism, the dual-paradigm model still seems to hold relevance for today’s arts and cultural journalism. Moreover, it is particularly delightful to see that there is a new generation growing up with cultural journalism and criticism. For continuity, it is essential that there are doctoral students studying the topic and feeling ownership of the field, and, in addition, develop and test the model further in different contexts.

What are my future plans? I have continued to extend the dataset that was included in my doctoral thesis and started in 1978; the last sample week was two weeks ago, which means that I have collected material until 2023. One day when I manage to find time to analyze the latest sample weeks of the dataset I will try to put together an article rethinking the changes of cultural journalism. Before that, I have some commitments that are more urgent: among other things, while in Bergen, I received a message from Routledge that my newest research monograph has been accepted for publication. It is a sequential to the book that dealt with vernacular reviewing of cultural products but now approaches the theme from a pedagogical perspective.