Henrik Örnebring

My current research is focused on three areas: the history of the Black press in the US; threats to and harassment of journalists; and the restructuring of journalistic labor and changing journalistic working conditions in the face of technological and economic transformation.

Previously I have conducted research on comparative European journalism; media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe; local news ecology; comparative media history; and transmedia entertainment from a historical perspective.

My most recent book is Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (with Michael Karlsson; University of Missouri Press, 2022), a history of the notion of journalistic "independence" and its meaning. The book has won two major awards: the AEJMC Tankard Book Award (2023) and the ICA Journalism Studies Division Book Award (2024). 

I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020).

I have also had a three-year grant from FORTE (together with Elizabeth Van Couvering and Robert MacKenzie) for the project "Labor market intermediary platforms and mediatization in the Swedish gig economy (SWEGIG)" (2019-21), which studied how new apps and web pages which advertise short-term jobs are changing the employment relationship through new demands of mediated self presentation and self promotion.

Henrik Örnebring mainly teaches Media Theory, Organizational Communication, and supervises bachelor's theses. He is currently the main supervisor of two PhD students (Fredrik Edin and Carina Tenor).

Henrik Örnebring is Advisory Board Member of the Worlds of Journalism Survey (www.worldsofjournalism.org) led by Professor Thomas Hanitzsch of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany; Advisory Committee Member of the project Journalistic Role Performance Across the Globe (http://www.journalisticperformance.org/) led by Dr Claudia Mellado of the University of Santiago, Chile.

He was a member of the Swedish Research Council Review Panel on Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, and Peace and Conflict Research, 2015-17; Chair of the Swedish Media Research Association (FSMK) 2016-18; and Vice-Chair/Chair of the ICA Journalism Studies Division 2015-18.

I got my BA in Media and Communication here at Karlstad University ('93) and my PhD at the University of Gothenburg ('01). Between 2002 and 2013 I worked in the United Kingdom, mostly at the University of Oxford but also at the London School of Economics, University of Leicester and Roehampton University. In 2013 I moved back to Sweden and Karlstad with my family.

Örnebring, Henrik & Michael Karlsson (2022) Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press. https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826222541/journalistic-autonomy/ 

Örnebring, Henrik, Elizabeth Van Couvering, David Regin Öborn & Robert MacKenzie (2024) The Mediatization of Work? Gig Workers and Gig Apps in Sweden. New Media & Society, 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241270470  

Örnebring, Henrik (2024) Thelma Berlack Boozer: a “forgotten first” at the School of Journalism at Lincoln University. Journalism History, 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2024.2386227 

Karlsson, Michael, Raul Ferrer Conill & Henrik Örnebring (2023) Recoding journalism: establishing normative dimensions for 21st century news media. Journalism Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2161929  [Winner of the 2023-24 Bob Franklin Award]