Digital disruption, permanent revolution

Jane Singer, who teaches at City University in London, and Wolfgang Blau, who is responsible for online journalism at the Guardian, made the case for a "new mindset" both in editorial offices and in media research at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur last week. "Diverge and conquer!" was Singer's motto - media makers and journalism researchers should win by distinguishing themselves from others and thus overcoming the consequences of the digital revolution.

In order to reinvent journalism ("Re-Inventing Journalism" was the ambitious conference theme), many prominent figures from media research and practice, as well as numerous young researchers from many corners of the world, traveled to the conference. Singer first traced the reasons why journalists and media managers find it so difficult to deal with the digital upheaval and recalled typical defensive reactions that initially made it difficult for many editorial offices to deal with digitalization.

As positive developments, Singer cited steps towards community building, such as those undertaken by the Guardian with its memberships (examples in Germany include the taz, but also the recently launched Austrian online version of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, NZZ.at), event hosting, as part of which the Texas Tribune organizes 60 to 70 lucrative events - from panel discussions to receptions and symposia to the annual "Texas Tribune Festival", but also new forms of crowdfunding, with which established editorial offices in the English-speaking world are now apparently also making targeted efforts to co-finance individual investigations or departments with the public.
 
After a day of very exciting contributions from media research, Wolfgang Blau followed on seamlessly from Singer in a second keynote: He invited media researchers to take a closer look at the consequences of digitalization and mobile communication for publishing houses and to help them respond to the changes with "more elasticity". They and journalists should view Internet giants such as Apple, Google and Facebook neither as "friends" nor "enemies", but as circumstances that need to be dealt with creatively. He called on researchers to go beyond the usual commercial metrics, which ultimately only measure clicks, shares and session time, and develop measurement methods that capture the value of quality journalism more realistically and, for example, trace the spillover effects that it generates when it stimulates thought, irritates or triggers new communication in society. In reference to the Web 2.0 guru Clay Shirky, Blau finally predicted a "permanent revolution" - simply because the costs of experimenting on the Internet are so low that new breakthroughs such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram can be expected at any time. Highlights such as the event in Winterthur are few and far between in the overflowing series of events on the future of media, even though this has long since mutated into a lucrative congress business. With comparable events, including the Journalism Day, which takes place every fall, the ZHAW has become a hub in Switzerland for the international exchange of knowledge in media and journalism research. It is also a place for dialog between media practitioners and researchers.

Creative forms of science transfer into media practice were also tested last week in Winterthur. Two samples: In "High Density Workshops", the participating researchers presented their research findings in five minutes in a kind of "pitch" and then explained them in more detail to a smaller circle of interested parties in a poster session. In a workshop on the future of journalism training, Marlis Prinzing (Macromedia University, Cologne) inspired the participants to join in using the "World Cafe" method. Instead of long lectures, there were guided discussions in small groups with alternating participants, almost reminiscent of speed dating. It is true that neither journalism nor media research or journalism training were reinvented in Winterthur. However, the conference design also implicitly contained a clear message: not only journalism, but also media research must become "interactive" if it is to succeed in creating communication in the border area between research and practice - in other words, where skepticism and mutually cultivated prejudices usually block the exchange.

Stephan Russ-Mohl directs the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano.