No. 38 - Andreas Hepp, Wiebke Loosen, Hendrik Kühn, Paul Solbach, Leif Kramp - The Figuration of Pioneer Journalism in Germany: Actors, Experimental Areas, Dynamics

There is hardly anything that keeps journalism as busy as its own transformation. For well over twenty years, the industry has been talking about the risks and opportunities of its media and structural change: in countless blogs, interviews, conferences, in “journalism journalism” (Malik, 2004), i.e. in journalistic reporting on journalism itself. This also applies in a similar way to journalism research, which can certainly also be said to have a certain “fixation on change”. In most cases, both in practice and in academia, this is associated with a tendency to focus on the “new” or on what is currently considered “innovative”: the “trendy” medium, the “latest” technology, the “creative” practice or the “evolved” organization (entity) (e.g. Boczkowski, 2004; Boyles, 2016; Carlson & Usher, 2016). From a scientific point of view, however, such projects geared towards the “new” are not necessarily always expedient. It is no coincidence that Bernd Blöbaum (2005: 56-57) states that the “typical individual projects” in journalism research are not able to “even begin to capture the change”.

About the authors

Andreas Hepp
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and spokesperson for the ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen. He has been a visiting researcher and professor at leading institutions such as the London School of Economics and Political Science, Goldsmiths University of London, Université Paris II Panthéon ASSAS, Stanford University and others. His research and teaching focus on how media change and transformations in the way we communicate are related to re-figurations within culture and society. Andreas Hepp is a member of the Leopoldina working group “Digitalization and Democracy” and one of the co-founders of molo.news.

Wiebke Loosen
Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen has been a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research │ Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and a professor at the University of Hamburg since 2010. She studied communication science, psychology and German studies at the University of Münster, where she also completed her doctorate. Her habilitation at the University of Hamburg was dedicated to the topic of “Transformations of journalism and journalism research”. In her current research, Wiebke Loosen deals with data journalism, the changing journalism/audience relationship, forms of pioneer journalism and the developing start-up culture in journalism as well as journalism-like services of algorithms.

Hendrik Kühn
Hendrik Kühn is a research assistant at the Center for Communication, Media and Information Sciences (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen in the DFG project “Pioneer Journalism: The Re-Figuration of the Organization(s) of Journalism”, where he is doing his doctorate on journalistic narratives of reality. He studied sociology at the University of Bielefeld and graduated with a thesis on the problem of intersubjectivity in Husserl and Heidegger. He is also the author of the book “Theory of Singularities” about the philosopher Agamben and has published a novel and several short stories.

Paul Solbach
Paul Solbach is a doctoral candidate at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) in Hamburg, where he is writing his doctoral thesis on the datafication of business processes in journalistic companies. Solbach is also the founder and managing director of a technology start-up (Next Media Accelerator W18) and previously worked as a senior developer for the Newslab of the German Press Agency.

Leif Kramp
Dr. Leif Kramp is research coordinator at the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. With a doctorate in media culture studies and journalism research, he has been monitoring the transformation of the digital media environment at the interface between science and practice for over 15 years. He is particularly interested in deciphering how the interplay of instinctive and persistent forces changes media behavior. Kramp is the author and co-editor of numerous books and studies on the transformation of media and journalism.