by Hektor Haarkötter / When important news fail to reach their recipients, we sometimes refer to this process as agenda cutting. This article presents the key theoretical positions on this under-researched phenomenon, presenting important study results as well as empirical findings on internal editorial decision-making processes whereby topics are removed from the agenda.
by Eva Brands / Konrad Scherfer / After the digital turn in media, a central economic imperative for publishing is to build and secure subscription rates. Under the conditions of digitization, publishers are facing new journalistic and marketing challenges with their subscription management, because newspaper subscription figures and sales have been falling for years. Publishers are developing preventive measures to ward off cancellations to retain their readers in the long term. In this article, observations are made as to which relevance digital routines have in view of this development and which aspects of the user experience are relevant regarding the use of Plus Offers.
by Eva Schmidt / Ingeborg Bachmann was the ›girl wonder‹ of postwar literature in the German-speaking world. Today, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize is still considered one of the most important literary prizes in the German-speaking world. Less well known is the fact that Ingeborg Bachmann was not just a poet, storyteller, and novelist, but also a journalist, reporting from Rome for various radio stations and newspapers.
by Michael Graßl, Jonas Schützeneder, and Klaus Meier / Artificial intelligence has become a buzzword in business and society, denoting any automated, cooperative, and corrective forms of interaction between humans and machines. There is a need for information, discussion, and systematization – despite or rather because of the wealth of publications on the topic that crop up on an almost daily basis. This article is an attempt to bring some (conceptual) order to this field.
by Karin Burghardt / She was a driven woman – both by the times she was born into and by her own lofty ambitions. Young Hilde Spiel wanted to be a writer. »I’m twenty-four and I still haven’t done anything to earn immortality«, she wrote in her memoirs, even though by that time, she had already been ambitiously building her writing career.
by Laura Badura and Katherine M. Engelke / The purpose of this study is to disclose metajournalistic discourse on risks (i.e., false, incomplete, erroneous information) that are present during the use of news content for recipients and to discern whether this self-criticism can contribute towards legitimizing journalism’s authority. Journalistic consideration of risks is relevant to the relationship between journalism and the audience because recipients’ trust always relates to risk-taking.
by Siegfried Weischenberg / Never has journalism in Germany been attacked more ferociously than in the many publications of »alternative« media criticism, which has gained momentum in recent years. The tone has become even harsher since the »mainstream media« started reporting widely on the management of the pandemic. They are accused of total professional failure, further narrowing the corridor of acceptable opinions, one-sided propaganda in favor of the restrictions in general and the vaccination effort, in particular, as well as a complete lack of balance in their selection of experts who are given a platform. But, for all their radicalism, these »alternative media critics« do not differ that much from the »mainstream« in that they, too, like to self-reference amongst their own pack and are also quite adept at harnessing sensationalism to command attention, even if the facts are rather thin.
by Jana Rick / Pensioners working in journalism have so far been the subject of little research. Yet with studies suggesting that this group makes up a large proportion of freelance journalists in Germany, it is worth focusing an investigation on these pensioners. This paper is based on a survey of 102 journalists from all over Germany who draw a pension and are still journalists as their main or side job. For the first time, the data allows us to describe pensioners in journalism and provide information on their socio-demographics, working situation, and working conditions.
by Steven Thomsen / The work of Norman Mailer is far less prevalent in the German-speaking world now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Few of those who continue to read or discover his novels today know that the American author also worked as a journalist throughout almost his entire career. Loved and hated in equal measure in his home country, the intellectual was a master of using literary techniques to enliven journalistic texts. This paper uses the famous report on the Democratic National Convention, »Superman Comes to the Supermarket,« to illustrate how Mailer redefined and went beyond the boundaries of traditional reportage.
by Marco Braghieri, Tobias Blanke and Jonathan Gray / What is the role and significance of digital long-form content aggregators in contemporary journalism? This article contends that they are an important, emerging object of study in journalism research and provides a digital methods analysis and theoretical engagement with Longform.org, one of the most prominent long-form content aggregators on the web.
