No. 10 - Leif Kramp: Conceptualizing metropolitan journalism: New approaches, new communicative practices, new perspectives?

Journalism is on the verge of many things: its institutional pillars struggle heftily with the economic challenges that arise from changing media habits and the unpredictability of what gains and loses popularity among audiences. Audiences become even more fragmented day by day. They can select from countless digital media services and contents globally at their convenience, only restrained by their own capabilities in terms of literacy and resources. This continuously pushes forward competition between legacy news organizations and ever-new actors that enter the global information ecosphere. In a rapidly urbanizing world where cities grow and reach new levels of complexity (cf. Kouritt/Nijkamp/Scholten 2015), journalism has a lot to accomplish while being confronted with transformational challenges. It was Simmel who accentuated the complex and consequential interdependencies of social interaction in a metropolis with serious consequences for (public) communication:

“The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.” (Simmel 2000 [1903]: 50)

Against this background of profound change, journalists try to find ways to sustain their
societal function. Journalism as a practice is confronted with seemingly endless
possibilities of using emerging media technologies, tools and services to produce the news
and present information in new ways and forms.

About the author

Leif Kramp
Dr. Leif Kramp is a communication and media scholar and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) of the University of Bremen since 2011. Previously, Kramp worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Macromedia University for Media and Communication in Hamburg, as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies in Berlin, as well as a research project assistant at the Hans-Bredow Institute for Media Research in Hamburg. Kramp studied journalism, media and communication studies, history and economics at the University of Hamburg. He teaches at the Institute for Historical Journalism, Communication and Media Studies of the University of Bremen, the Jacobs University Bremen and the Hamburg Media School. He is a founding member as well as board member of the Association for Media and Journalism Criticism and founding member of the German academic initiative Audiovisual Heritage. Kramp is a member of the editorial board of the author portal VOCER and one of the directors of the junior executive programme VOCER Innovation Medialab.