No. 7 - Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz, Andreas Hepp & Rebecca Venema: Communicative Figurations of Financial Blogging: Deliberative and Moralizing Modes of Crisis Communication during the Eurocrisis

Financial blogging can be understood as a practice of the eurocrisis’ “communicative construction” (Knoblauch, 2013). But it is not only financial blogging, also other media and their coverage – newspapers, television, online journals etc. – are relevant for the communicative construction of the eurocrisis as a specific political conflict. In a certain sense
we can understand the eurocrisis therefore as a mediatized conflict: “a conflict in which the media have a performative involvement and constitutive role” (Cottle, 2006, p. 9). Through mediatized crisis communication, not least in financial blogging, the eurocrisis became an important part of public discourse. Therefore, its construction is linked to a
certain framing and representation in the media (Schranz & Eisenegger, 2011) as well as the modes of its communicative construction, as we will demonstrate within this chapter in relation to financial blogging. In this sense, our starting point is the actors’ constellation comprising a certain group of bloggers and their specific talk about the crisis in its
moral dimensions.

Our perspective is the crisis as it is communicatively constructed in public communication − not the crisis communication of financial organizations to their stakeholders. With this approach, we are able to show that this debate has been constructed by two modes of communication, moralizing and deliberation, which predominantly refer to value orientations concerning a) the field of economics itself and b) how to communicate values properly during this crisis, in particular to improve the consequences of the crisis. In this sense the public communication in media “has the function to face something held to be threatening” and reveals a wide set of negative feelings concerning the crisis (Peter and
Knoop et al., 2012, p. 50).

About the authors

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz
Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz is a Professor of communication and media studies with an emphasis on media change at the ZeMKI, Center for Communication, Media and Information Research, University of Bremen. From 2005-2012 she has worked as an Associated Professor of Theory and Sociology of Public Communication and Media Ethics at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Leipzig, and from 1999 to 2005 as a research assistant at the same University. From 2008-09 she was a Contract Professor at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich. 2010-11 she was Deputy Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Muenster. She received her doctorate in 2000 from the University of Muenster with a thesis on the intellectual history of Newspaper Studies in the Weimar Republic and got her Venia Legendi at the University of Leipzig with a study (Habilitation) on French communication theories. She worked as a lecturer at the Bauhaus University Weimar (2002-2003) and at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg/CH (2008-2011). As a postdoctoral fellow of the DAAD, in 1999 she carried out research at the Institut Français de Presse (University of Paris). She studied journalism, political science and romance languages at the University in Muenster.

Andreas Hepp
Andreas Hepp is Professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on Media Culture and Communication Theory at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Sciences, of which he is the spokesman. From 2004 to 2005 Andreas Hepp was an Assistant Professor of Cultural Significance of Digital Media, and from 2005 to 2010 Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Bremen. Prior to his work at the University of Bremen, in 2003/4 he represented a professorship of Communication Studies with a focus on Media Sociology and Media Psychology at
the Institute of Communication Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Muenster. From 1995 to 1997 he was a research assistant in the DFG project “Talking about television” at the University of Trier, in 1999 he was a research associate at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in the Interdisciplinary Institute for Applied Cultural Studies (IAK), from 1999 to 2003 a leading research assistant at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies (IfMK) of the TU Ilmenau. In addition, Andreas Hepp has taught and researched as a guest of those universities, as well as at the Goldsmiths College of the University of London, the Nottingham Trent University and the University of Sunderland.

Rebecca Venema
Since August 2013, Rebecca Venema is a research associate in the research project „Communicative Figuration of Business Ethics in Times of ‘Crisis’“ as part of the “Communicative Figurations” research network. She holds a BA in Sociology, Political Science and Media Studies from the University of Siegen and studied a semester abroad at the University of Fribourg/Switzerland. Rebecca Venema continued her studies at the University of Leipzig in 2010. In the Master’s program in Communication and Media Studies she focused on empirical research on communication and media (as major field of study) and graduated with a master´s thesis on „Gentrification as a topic and point of reference of public communication“ in 2013. During her studies she worked as a tutor for empirical research and as a student assistant, contributing to (among other projects) an interational research project entitled „Local & regional Radio and TV Landscapes in Germany, USA and UK“.