EJO teams meeting in Berlin to discuss current issues and new strategies.
Reflections by multiple authors from across EJO teams
For 20 years, the European Journalism Observatory (EJO) has been reporting on current developments in journalism research and the media landscapes of Europe. This makes it one of the most sustainable projects designed to help increase the visibility of journalism research across Europe. On the occasion of this anniversary, the founder of the EJO, Stephan Russ-Mohl, and some of the editors reflected on the original idea of the project and how the network and the media landscapes of the partner countries have changed since then.
About the EJO
In 2004, Stephan Russ-Mohl founded the EJO with colleagues from the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano; the first websites appeared in German, Italian and English. Today, the EJO is a decentralised network of renowned institutes throughout Europe: from the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism at the Technical University of Dortmund and City University London, to Charles University in Prague and the University of Wroclaw, to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Complutense University of Madrid. The platform currently maintains websites in 11 European languages: German, English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian and Hungarian. Today, it owes its funding largely to the Essen-based Presse-Haus NRZ Foundation. In the early years, the Corriere del Ticino Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Robert Bosch Foundation were also important supporters.
Recently, the network was expanded to include Volda University College in Norway and the Institute for Communication Studies in North Macedonia. The Ukrainian team has resumed its activities after two years of forced absence due to the Russian war in Ukraine. Colleagues from the renowned Tunisian Institut de Presse et de Science de l’Information (IPSI) founded a branch of the EJO for the Arabic-speaking world – the Observatoire du Journalisme Arabe (AJO), which is published in French and Arabic. The EJO also cooperates with external partners – including various media outlets and the Afro Media Network.
The EJO consortium has jointly conducted numerous comparative studies on current topics in European journalism, including:
- Silent Migrants, Noisy Politics, Divided Media: The Coverage of Flight and Migration in 17 Countries (2020)
In addition to publishing its findings, the EJO network conducts research for joint comparative studies, organises conferences and is involved in journalism training at the participating universities.
Johanna Mack speaks to Stephan Russ-Mohl, founder of EJO
Stephan Russ-Mohl is the founder of the EJO and was a professor of journalism and media management at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano until 2018. He wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Tagesspiegel and industry publications.
What was the vision behind the founding of the EJO in 2004?
Stephan Russ-Mohl: That was a time when science journalism was flourishing in German-speaking countries and when media journalism was just beginning to flourish. During this time, I believe it was a realistic goal to present media research and, in particular, journalism research in such a journalistic way that the main target group, namely professional journalists, but also the wider audience, could see to some extent what media and journalism research has to offer and to what extent it can provide insights into journalism and journalistic work and the media industry.
Our goal was to expand science journalism to include communication and media research and to no longer do this alone, but rather in a team with others, especially young scientists, who would then be responsible for the individual websites.
And where did the idea come from to implement this project in an international context?
I was already very involved in European journalism at the Free University of Berlin, where we had set up a journalism school and established the European Journalism Fellowships programme. Since then, several fellows, journalists from all over Europe and especially Eastern Europe who already have professional experience, have been able to spend a year in Berlin, furthering their education, recharging their batteries and working on their own research projects. The model for this was the American programmes that existed at the time at Harvard, Stanford, and 34 other universities.
Later, I transferred to the Università della Svizzerá italiana. The question then was, what can you do at a small, newly founded university in the Swiss province in Lugano? A scholarship programme like the one in Berlin wouldn’t have worked. You needed a big city for that.
But observing journalism in all of Europe and relying primarily on media research seemed like the obvious thing to do from multilingual Switzerland. And that’s how the Journalism Observatory came about – initially with three language versions: German, English and Italian. We gradually managed to raise more money to open up further language versions. The further language variants were, in my view, very, very important: when journalists engage with specialist literature, they do so in their mother tongue.
I don’t think you can assume that all journalists speak English well enough and have enough time to research and engage with their own profession in English and in an international context. So the idea was to present the existing journalism research in a journalistic way and translate it into the individual European languages. At that time, there was not yet the kind of translation software that we can work with today, and so the idea was to have a doctoral student with previous journalistic experience in each language.
The network has now been active for 20 years, partly with the original team and partly with new editors, and it is still being funded in some countries. How do you see the development of the EJO during this time?
I am just very happy that the EJO still exists. I am also a bit proud of it, as one of the founding fathers.
Of course, a project like this also has to adapt to the completely changed framework conditions. When we started, as I said, it was a heyday of science journalism, the early heyday of media journalism. It was then very quickly scaled back again because the media giants, while they are happy to pillory everyone else, were very reluctant to be the subject of reporting themselves. I think that was the main reason why media journalism didn’t really work out.
What then developed through social networks and how journalism ultimately suffered from the triumph of Facebook and Google and the collapse of advertising revenues – none of that could have been foreseen at the beginning of the millennium. So many things have simply changed and you have to adapt to them if you want to survive, and I think you managed that quite well.
The EJO teams also met regularly in person at the annual meetings.
The EJO has also witnessed and observed 20 years of change in the media landscape. Which highlights or aspects of this change are particularly important?
The most important thing is certainly that the funding basis has deteriorated completely. In journalism in general, and of course this applies in particular to science and media journalism. In journalism, the belief prevails that political journalism is the most important thing of all and sports journalism is the second most important, and everything else somehow tends to fall by the wayside, although the priorities of readers and media users could probably be quite different. And if you just think for a moment about how strongly science shapes our everyday lives, as does the media, then it would be obvious to say that science is at least as important as political reporting. And certainly more important than sports reporting. But just thinking about it seems to be relatively difficult in journalism. Sometimes I wonder how thoughtlessly we accept the existing system, even though it has serious flaws.
What are these flaws?
I recently tried to reduce it to two keywords. One is the attention economy, which ensures that all the topics that can be used to generate clicks and scare people come to the fore, while much else tends to be ignored. In retrospect, the prime example of this was the coronavirus reporting.
The other keyword that also plays a very important role in the political arena is the struggle for cultural hegemony, which has also taken on forms that are not particularly beneficial for journalism. This fight is not only being waged between the established parties, i.e. SPD, Greens, Left Party and CDU/CSU and FDP, but is also taking place in editorial offices, and we now have far too many journalists in editorial offices who are activists. They think they know where things should go, instead of accepting citizens as independent thinkers and simply having the goal of providing them with the necessary information and news, and to do so as impartially as possible and in such a way that people can form their own opinions.
In my opinion, mainstream journalism in Germany has become much more narrow-minded. This is not beneficial for democracy, and it has led to populist parties like the AfD and the alliance Sahra Wagenknecht gaining a lot of popularity, because many people now feel that the mainstream media and especially public broadcasting are unfortunately providing them with somewhat one-sided information.
Did you perhaps gain surprising insights from the network, from the collaboration, or did things develop differently than previously thought?
In retrospect, I also underestimated how different the cultures are in the individual countries, both in terms of journalism and science. But perhaps that is also one of Europe’s strengths: that it unites so many different things. However, the individual websites often operated more in their national language instead of adopting content from each other, which was the original idea. This is not only true for media research, but I believe that it is a general problem that we are very much fixated on our own national language in journalism. And if anything else happens, then it’s in the Anglo-Saxon language area, where you somehow have a bit of access, and you pick up a tiny bit of information, and maybe you also read the Economist if you’re a very educated, very curious journalist. But to read a French newspaper or an Italian newspaper, or to regularly monitor a Spanish website? That’s very, very rare.
Reflections by EJO Poland
Michał Kuś edits the Polish EJO site, based at the University of Wrocław, together with Adam Szynol.
The 20th anniversary of EJO is certainly an ideal opportunity to consider both the development of our network and the development of the media worldwide from a national, Polish perspective. The Polish media are not only facing the challenges of media digitisation and the development of online media, but have also become a platform and, in some cases, actors in processes related to the deepening socio-political polarisation of the country with all its (mainly unfavorable) manifestations.
Within the framework of the EJO consortium, we have tried to help colleagues from academia and abroad to understand these processes, both in terms of the specifics of the Polish case and in terms of seeing these phenomena in a broader, international perspective. In my opinion, this is a testament to the relevance of our joint project, and situations in which we were able to reach both large, opinion-forming media in individual countries and those with an international reach (and thus their audience) with our message were a source of particular satisfaction for the EJO Poland team.
We are also very pleased that the collaboration within EJO is not limited to publishing on our websites and exchanging content, but also translates into purely scientific collaboration, i.e. joint projects and publications in recognized publishers and scientific journals.
Reflections by EJO French-speaking Switzerland
Cécile Détraz is the editor of the French-language EJO site, which is managed by Annik Dubied.
Since 2017, the hundreds of articles published by the Academy of Journalism and Media at the University of Neuchâtel have provided a good overview of media issues in the French-speaking world.
Seven years ago, our authors were dealing with digital algorithms and GAFAS. The end of the printed newspaper Le Matin in 2018 was a prime example of the difficulties facing the press in Switzerland. Unfortunately, this period is reminiscent of what the Swiss press is currently going through, as waves of layoffs and media concentration continue.
In 2019, there were a number of observations on the relationship with the public and on issues of disinformation and fake news, as trust in journalists continues to erode worldwide. However, in 2020, the emergence of the Covid-19 health crisis was accompanied by a wave of misinformation that reminded us of the importance of quality journalism.
The years 2019 to 2021 were generally very fruitful for innovative initiatives in Swiss and French-language media. Newsletters are taking over editorial offices, the new online medium heidi.news is being developed, journalists are investing in Twitch to reach new audiences, and podcasts, which have been popular in other countries for some time, are becoming increasingly common in French-speaking Switzerland.
The topic of automated journalism first appeared on our website in 2021 and became one of the main topics three years later. Alongside these concerns, war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, prompting the EJO network to question the practice of war journalism.
For 20 years, EJO has been shedding light on and analyzing the challenges of journalism today. Although some of the observations are not encouraging, the network has always strived to highlight possible solutions by bringing researchers and professionals together to reflect on them.
“Regards d’experts”: in-depth video interviews to better understand changes in contemporary journalism
In 2018, the French-language EJO began experimenting with video interviews with experts in journalism. The first interview was conducted in New York with American journalist Ted Conover. He talks about his practices, immersive reporting, the ethical dilemmas he encounters, and the influence of storytelling on the journalistic landscape. He also talks about the need for journalists to be more transparent about their methods.
Over the years, a dozen researchers and journalists have taken part in the project and provided an overview of the challenges facing contemporary journalism, but also – and above all – of the initiatives that already exist in certain media to meet them. This is particularly true of our series of interviews on artificial intelligence, in which three heads of major French newsrooms – Le Monde, Agence France-Presse and franceinfo – tell us how they are integrating these tools into their daily work and what ethical and professional issues arise in the process.
This article was originally published on: https://de.ejo-online.eu Read the original article here: https://de.ejo-online.eu/in-eigener-sache/20-jahre-european-journalism-observatory-ein-blick-zurueck-und-in-die-zukunft
Opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views, policies or positions of the EJO or the organisations with which they are affiliated.
