Transformation of Journalism and the Public Sphere

The research group ‘Transformation of Journalism and the Public Sphere’ examines the transformation of journalism and the public sphere through an empirical and theory-driven approach – partly to understand what this means for democratic cohesion.

Journalism and the public sphere are emerging under new circumstances today: artificial intelligence is not merely intervening from the outside, but is becoming part of society’s communicative DNA. Language models help shape the narrative, platforms pre-sort content, and recommendation systems decide what reaches the public sphere in the first place – and this is shifting the way society communicates with itself.

One focus of the research group is on communicative AI: language models and automated systems have long since ceased to be mere tools; instead, they are themselves becoming participants in social communication. They intervene deeply in the structures through which the public sphere is formed. We analyse this reciprocal appropriation: how AI permeates communicative fields such as journalism, whilst at the same time being appropriated and integrated by people and organisations.

Another strand of our research examines the role that media and communication play in fostering – or jeopardising – social cohesion, and how the social order of understanding and media usage are changing in the digital age – supported by empirical evidence, for example through surveys on the cohesion-related services provided by public service broadcasters or participation in the qualitative panel of the Research Institute for Social Cohesion. Knowledge transfer is of particular importance here: we actively contribute our findings to public discourse and to dialogue with editorial teams, educational institutions and opinion leaders.

Our research is theory-driven, interdisciplinary, methodologically open, internationally networked – and consistently conducted through dialogue-oriented exchange with practitioners and the public. As part of the Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS), the world’s largest comparative study on the state of journalism, we contribute to international journalism research.