‘Always Viking’: Archaeologists Collaborating with Public Service Media to Broaden Access to Archaeological Fieldwork

This article examines how collaboration with Public Service Media structures the relationship between archaeologists and public. To be able to understand such collaborations, we have studied an online news production by Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Always Viking’, covering one week of excavating recently discovered Viking ship at Gjellestad in Norway. The findings suggest that journalists, even when doing online-first production, mostly worked according a broadcasting media logic, few opportunities for public participate. In this, they prioritized audience’s ‘perceived reality’ over archaeologists’ ‘referential (Holtorf, Citation2007: 151–52) secure broader reach. Some elements format supported more reciprocal audience participation, however, combining livestream open ongoing Q&A sessions. opened unmediated, direct, meaningful encounters Overall, study shows long mutually beneficial service archaeology (Piccini, Citation2007) can strengthened undertaking joint experimentation exploration participatory communication models online.