Journalists, Bloggers, and "Newsfluencers": Who is a journalist and who is not? What distinguishes journalists from others, who set those boundaries, and are they about to collapse?

 

Numerous factors are shaking the boundaries of the journalistic profession: New actors and affordances in the field of journalism, a changing environment for news professionals, and an increasing amount of institutional and societal challenges (resource scarcity, post-truth era, etc.) - to name a few.

Therefore, what it means to be a journalist, the very markers of the profession, are continously (re-)negotiated. In discourse, influenced by various interests and actors, journalistic boundaries, practices, and social obligations of the profession are (re-)defined. This process, called boundary work, will be the starting point of the seminar and will slowly be used to approach the guiding questions mentioned at the beginning. The final goal is a broad understanding of how journalistic boundaries influence journalists and journalism at all analytical levels.

 

Course requirements: Active preparation & participation, presentation, essay/paper (Hausarbeit)

 

Note: The seminar will be entirely in English and only BA students of the Department of Communication or international students of the Faculty of Social Sciences (Erasmus) can be admitted to the seminar.

Kurs im HIS-LSF

Semester: ST 2024