Baltic Media Systems

Presentation of the themes in this section is structured around the idea that media systems and journalism practices in the Baltic States can be studied and researched as belonging to a single group of media systems with defining characteristics such as each country having a small market (with populations varying from 1.3 million in Estonia to 2.4 million in Latvia and 3.4 million in Lithuania), very liberal media regulation and weak media accountability. Some of the parameters in these three characteristics disclose aspects which have more or less an ‘objective character’ such as size and wealth of the market, audience size and difference in major linguistic groups in the country as well as religious and ethnic diversity and so forth. Other parameters have a kind of ‘subjective’ (or culturally determined) features, for example, propensity of people to consume media or general openness of the nation to innovations.
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Democracy, (European) Public Sphere and Politics

This section is structured around the normative ideal that the function of news media is to support democratization, or to put it more precise – to guarantee the freedom of speech, to ensure that different opinions are heard and to act as a public watchdog against the abuse of power. As contemporary practices reveal, media has many goals to aim at; at the same time, however, media’s actual informational contribution does not meet the normative demands. A special attention here is also dedicated to European communication matters. Giving a particular attention to the trends of communication management within the European Union member states, communication characteristics in transnational and national levels are discussed. Emphasizing differences in communication cultures, which determine media performance in European reporting, the phenomenon of news “domestification”, globalization and internationalization, and their effects on media representations are being discussed in more detail. In addition, a number of critical issues are addressed such as effects of supranational developments on local (political) news representation, EU communication policies and their impact on European reporting, and so forth.
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Communication Cultures and Media Comparisons

The arguments presented here move around the idea that the main goal of mass media is not just the transmission of information. Most importantly, media products also confirm a certain social and cultural order where media production happens. In this context, the idea of communication culture seems to be a very useful one as it allows placing the discussion of media production into the broadest political, economic, social, cultural, technological and linguistic context. This particular approach implies that media products can be analyzed in the light of a broader culture of society in which media production happens and where media products take shape. In other words, the idea of communication culture does not isolate media production (with its routines, norms, values and considerations) from the widest social and political context, namely the behaviors that are characteristic to a society in general and are not only a part of a particular professional culture.
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Virtual Belongings (Journalism in the Era of Social Networks)

The central question of this section is whether journalism developments online lead to a more diverse picture of social reality (by offering new ways to reach and contact audiences, by providing breaking news, and integrating audiences into news production); or it simply reproduces an illusionary diversity of content by re-using same news published in other sources (e.g., mainstream media). Two major issues are tackled here. One of them sees structural changes such as changes in institutional conditions of political and media systems and relies strongly on the universalizing character of new media technologies and their potential to engage different fragmented audiences in debates and deliberation on controversial issues. Another approach strongly relies on contextual factors and particularities of communication histories and traditions of national context and national communication culture, and their impact on routines and messages communicated online.
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Journalism Training and Professionalization

This section provides an overview of journalism training and education in the three Baltic countries from both, historical and sociological perspectives. It also gives an account on major trends towards which the training of future professionals is shaped in academic and professional institutions in the Baltic States. Generally, journalism training is affected by two kinds of factors. Firstly, it relies on contextual factors and particularities of the national setting, such as political, economic and cultural contexts in which journalists perform their craft. Secondly, journalism development and professionalization is a process of active learning and re-learning, which involves adequate reaction to such factors as globalization of media markets, media industries and media content, emergence of intercultural character of messages, technological diffusion and so forth. 
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Miscellaneous

This section draws attention to a number of critical issues, such as intercultural communication, audience studies, gender representations, or media production practices. Studies presented here aim to analyze media products as having relations with a broader society.
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