News (10)

ZeMKI member Dr. Rieke Böhling and Dr. Berber Hagedoorn (University of Groningen, Netherlands) receive seed funding from the Hanse University Alliances’s Impuls Forschung program to hold two workshops – one on the North Sea island of Spiekeroog (Germany) and one on Schiermonnikoog (Netherlands). 

On February 7, 2026, ZeMKI member Rieke Böhling will give a lecture as part of Genealogica, a virtual festival dedicated to genealogy.

A new Article by the Weizenbaum Institute introduces OpenQDA, an open-source tool for qualitative data analysis, developed at ZeMKI.

The new ZeMKI working paper by author Raoni Rajão titled "The role of mass media in promoting fake environmental controversies in Brazil" has been published.

On Wednesday, January 21, 2026, ZeMKI, together with Radio Bremen/Bremen Zwei and the Bremen Press Club, hosted the ZeMKI Media Talks on the topic: “And tomorrow the world will not end (?). How the media communicates about crises” at Club 27.

BEDROOM JOURNALISTS? ZINES AND EARLY PLAYER CULTURES  In the 1980s and 1990s, for many computer game enthusiasts, the dream of a job in the games industry often began in their bedrooms: some created their first games on the C64 or Atari, while others wanted to write about games and literally put together their own gaming magazines. However, not much is known about these so-called zines.

In a presentation at the annual conference of the DGPuK's Reception and Impact Research Section in Klagenfurt, Dr. Sabine Reich shows how sexism in online comments shifts participation norms in political online discussions.

Under the title “Between Participation and Silencing—The Ambivalence of Online Discussions and Their Consequences,” the annual conference of the DGPuK's Reception and Impact Research Section will take place at the University of Klagenfurt from January 21 to 23, 2026.

As part of Special Issue #31 of the VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, edited by ZeMKI member Rieke Böhling, among others, contributions on the topic of “Television and the Family” are being sought.

On January 20, 2026, ZeMKI member Andreas Breiter was a guest at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) special event entitled “Trustworthy AI: From Data Collection to Organizational Embedding in Educational Settings.”

In January 2026, the article published by ZeMKI member Stephanie Geise together with Yi Xu is honored by the editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ) as one of the outstanding publications of 2025.

On January 15, 2026, FOCUS magazine published an article entitled "'So toxic': Illegal nude images flood Musk's chatbot", in which ZeMKI member Christian Katzenbach shares his expertise on the chatbot Grok, which creates critical and illegal X-content on command.