The new series of interviews with journalists, to be conducted between 2021 and 2023, will investigate risks and uncertainties journalists are facing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as around the globe. Its aim is to better understand the ways in which journalism adapts to and copes with different levels of risk and uncertainty in the three countries and in different political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts worldwide. The major goal of the study is to compare results across the three German-speaking countries as well as across a wide range of societies, to trace developments over time, and to identify key factors that drive cross-national differences in the way journalists conceive of, and deal with, risk and uncertainty. In addition, the project continues efforts to track the state of journalism in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as the situation of journalism around the world, as was the case in previous waves of the Worlds of Journalism Study.
In each country, surveys of two groups of journalists will be conducted: a main sample of professional mainstream journalists, and (as an effort to better represent areas of transformation in journalism) a secondary sample of peripheral actors who operate at the margins of journalism. Journalists are surveyed based on a unified methodological framework (including a common questionnaire along with instructions for defining populations, constructing samples, selecting respondents, conducting interviews as well as proper re-cording and handling of survey data), which allows for tight comparison across countries.
The Austrian study is conducted by Dr. Josef Seethaler and Mag. Andreas Riedl and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). National research partner is Prof. Dr. Folker Hanusch from the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna.
Project partners in Germany: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch, LMU Munich and Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen, Leibniz Institute for Media Research│Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI), in Switzerland: Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Wyss, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
More information on the Worlds of Journalism Study is to be found here.