Commentators on daily news or comunicators of scholary achievements?: The role of researchers in Danish news media

The objective of this article is to analyze the role played by researchers in news media. The method is a quantitative content analysis of 640 newspaper articles combined with two surveys: of journalists (N = 362) and researchers (N = 342) respectively. The conclusions are that researchers from the soft disciplines mainly contribute to hard news or background items, where their role is to comment on daily events as public experts. They do this because they consider it career enhancing. The journalists who use them as sources are often inexperienced journalists. However, they set the agenda. Both parties perceive the cooperation positively although researchers tend to be more reserved than the journalists.