In this article we present a research project that experimentally develops a local news platform based on empirical research (interviews, group discussions, a survey) and a co-creation approach. What ...is presented here is not a typical empirical social science research study but the culmination of an entire approach that is oriented toward software development. This article’s aim is to present the project’s conceptual ideas, its interdisciplinary character, its research-based development approach and the concept for a local news platform that grew out of our preliminary work. At each level we focus on the relationality which arises in the figurations of the actors involved and their various perspectives. First, we illustrate how relationality already shaped the objective of our project and how this results in its interdisciplinary structure and research design. We then discuss this idea with reference to our empirical findings, that is, the paradox of the local public sphere: While all the actors we interviewed—those who (professionally) produce content and those who use it—have a high appreciation for the idea of a local public sphere, the mediated connection to this sphere is diminishing at the same time. We understand this as the real challenge for local journalism and the local public sphere at large, and not just for individual media organizations. This is also the reason why we argue for a fundamentally relational approach: from a theoretical point of view, it can be used to grasp the crisis of the local public; from a practical point of view, relationality represents the core characteristic of the platform in development. On this basis, we will then show how the concept of the experimental local news platform evolved through the use of a prototype as a relational boundary object. This development lead to the conceptualization of the platform molo.news which itself is characterized by a fourfold relationality. Our concluding argument is that approaching relationality in a more rigorous way could be the key to exploring the future of local journalism.
Recent journalism research often argues that it is high time that we moved beyond the newsroom and begin asking who it is that is stimulating transformation and not what it is, as individual ...journalists, entrepreneurs, technology firms, and startups assume an increasingly critical role in the development of the field. This article introduces the concept of ‘pioneer journalism’ to provide just such an analysis across different organizational contexts. Pioneer journalism is understood as a particular group of journalists that incorporates new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations. To introduce this concept, the article argues along three stages. First, it develops a theoretical basis on which to pin our understanding of pioneering practice by reviewing previous research into journalism’s transformation beyond the newsroom. Second, it extends the theoretical discussion into the empirical realm by looking at five extreme cases of pioneer journalists through an explorative interview analysis. Third, and to conclude, an integrated concept of pioneer journalism is outlined as a point of departure from which to further consider journalism’s re-figuration more generally.
The notion of the "blurring boundaries" has become a flashy label to characterize the way journalism is manifestly changing in the age of the internet. This article explores this idea of ...de-boundedness and discusses the question whether there is anything more behind it than a catch-all diagnosis for the processes of change and transformation in the circumstances of communication in society, in general, and for journalism, in particular. To this end, de-boundedness as a proposition initially receives a more concrete definition. Its foundations in theories of differentiation and especially in the theory of social systems by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann will be discussed, where differentiation, that is, drawing lines of demarcation, is the essential factor. It is shown that systems theory provides different possibilities for characterizing forms of de-differentiation or "blurring boundaries". Within systems theory they can be interpreted in terms of the evolutionary emergence of new forms of journalism, the co-evolutionary processes between journalism and its environment and/or as interpenetrations of journalism with other societal systems. It is demonstrated that changes in journalism oscillate between differentiation and de-differentiation, so that it can be described as a (de-)differentiated phenomenon.
In politics and academia, but also in the broader public, there has been wide discussion concerning a sense of dwindling social cohesion most markedly in liberal democracies. One of the virulent ...questions in this context is the role journalism plays and the common notion that journalism can strengthen or weaken cohesion. However, there is no shared understanding of whether and how journalism or journalistic reporting influence cohesion and whether and in what way journalism is at all responsible for strengthening a society’s cohesion. Against this background, we conducted four group discussions with a total of 21 experts from the fields of journalism, academia, and ‘cohesion practice’ in order to understand how different actors inside and outside the field of journalism view the relationship between social cohesion and journalism. The analysis reveals that there are no systematic differences between the views of these three expert groups. Nonetheless, the many facets of and different perspectives on the topic are fundamentally ambivalent. This is because the interrelation between journalism and social cohesion is characterized by tensions and trade-offs in and between three dimensions: society’s reachability, representability, and ability for dialogue. This also means that journalists need to balance these tensions time and again and, generally, a society continuously negotiates the interrelation between journalism and cohesion. In modern societies, journalism itself is a forum in which this negotiation takes place; and the fact that it takes place already contributes to cohesion, but can also compromise it.
PDF
