Browsing by Author "Kyllönen, Rasmus"

Amidst global challenges such as climate change, the covid-19 pandemic and digital menaces such as the spread of disinformation, as well as a fear of declining reading skills in Finland, several media companies have established a niche news genre aimed at subteen prosumers. This thesis is an exploration of children’s news from the perspective of the media professionals producing the content. The study inquires how the journalists imagine their audience – namely children in elementary school – when making news. With a poststructuralist, Foucauldian discourse theoretical approach, the thesis analyzes articulations by producers representing four major newsrooms in Finland (Yle, Svenska Yle, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet), gathered during five individually conducted semi-structured interviews. In accordance with the theoretical standpoint, the producers’ articulations contain statements, that consequently have a function with constitutive effects. The empirically informed interpretive account explores four discursive formations of children and childhood found in the material: the children as universal, capable, vulnerable, and as the ‘future’. These formations come to construct the concept of childhood, of what children are and what children should become. The news producers imagine children as competent beings, navigating the digital era skillfully, with a curiosity of their surroundings. Conflicting discourses of their vulnerability to digital harm fuels an objective of the news to be(come) a provider of safe and trustworthy information. In these discourses, the developmental level of children come to matter for what kind of content is deemed possible to produce for the audience. In imagining the children through a universal lens, the producers construct a rather one-dimensional image of what it means to be a child in Finland in the 21st century. This thesis contributes to the understudied field of children’s news with raising questions on how the mechanisms in news production, as seen from the discursive practices that constitute the work by news professionals, come to influence the way in which adults relate to children as media consumers.