An international network of researchers investigates how journalism is created in unusual places or by actors that previously were not predominantly concerned with news production.
Quadcopter pilots who engage in drone journalism, comic artists who tell news stories through graphic novels, statisticians and information designers who process and visualise large amounts of data in investigative reporting, software engineers who build algorithms that automatically produce news articles, satirists and late-night show anchor(wo)men who inform about relevant topics in an entertaining way: In the era of digitally networked media news is no more produced only by traditional journalists, but to a growing extent also by actors at the periphery of journalism.
The Hans Bredow Institute is part of an international network of researchers who study such cases in which journalism is created in unusual places, in extraordinary manner, or by unprecedented participants. The goal is to explore the fringes of the journalistic field and the impact on its core, i.e. on the established newsrooms of legacy media and their reporting.
Project Description
The Hans Bredow Institute adds to the networks’ research in different projects that deal with start-ups, new organizational models, and pioneer communities in journalism (“Journalism: New Organisational Models, Changing Audience Relationships, and their Effect on Journalistic Output”, “Pioneer Journalism: The Transformation of Journalism’s Organisational Foundation in the Tension between Technology Pioneers, Start-ups, and Established Media Organisations“), with audience participation in journalism (“(Re-)Discovering the audience”), as well as with the development of the novel reporting style of data journalism (“Wenn aus Daten Journalismus wird”, “When Data Become News”).
Members of the network are, besides Wiebke Loosen and Julius Reimer from the Hans Bredow Institute: Tamara Witschge and Stefan Baack (University of Groningen, Netherlands), Laura Ahva (University of Tampere, Finland), Irene Costera Meijer (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands), Florence Le Cam, David Domingo and Victor Wiard (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Andy Williams (Cardiff University, Great Britain), Chris W. Anderson (currently: City University New York, USA; prospectively: University of Leeds, Great Britain), Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), as well as Folker Hanusch (Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany).
The group of researchers is a continuation of the network “Understanding Public Participation: Journalism and Democracy in a Digital Age” headed by Tamara Witschge, that was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) from 2012 to 2015.
