Emerging Models for News at the Periphery of German Journalism

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

As the boundaries of journalism continue to move and perhaps dissolve, there is an ongoing adaptation of journalists’ understanding of their roles, and a shift in the gratifications that journalists receive from their work; this is especially the case for news outlets at the boundaries of journalism. The present study conceived of journalism as ranging from a central core of news journalism, surrounded by advisory and tabloid journalism, and further forms of boundary-crossing outlets and practices further towards the boundaries, and focusses especially on the latter category.

But how can such journalistic border-crossers be identified and defined? The study focussed on the nominees for the prestigious Grimme Online Award for innovative journalistic and quasi-journalistic initiatives; in this it focussed only on outlets that were not directly associated with news organisations towards the core of established journalism. Some 256 of these nominees responded to the project’s survey, and over 70% of them considered their outlet to be at least partially journalistic; their focus was predominantly on values such as education, news journalism, and innovation; their predominant aims included giving audiences food for though and contributing to public debate.

These outlets group into seven clusters, including innovative moderators, lecturing navigators, lecturing experts, and others; such providers seek a range of gratifications from their work, and these include creativity and freedom, entertainment, attention and recognition, and a counterweight to mainstream media; those who focussed mainly on news journalism mainly had economic motives and sought to work as counterweights to mainstream media, but did not pursue innovation and creativity; journalistic innovators, on the other hand, focussed especially on those creative elements for their gratifications. Such correlations seem intuitive and support the identification of a number of clusters of peripheral journalism projects.