A Century of Journalism History as Challenge

Abstract

Approaching journalism history through digital archives, digital sources, and digital methods is a demanding task for media historians, but also offers prospects. We explore some of the challenges and potential benefits in the light of a concrete research project that investigates journalism history in Germany from 1914 to 2014. The project focuses on the development of journalistic news storytelling following the inverted pyramid model. This paper mainly discusses the difficulties of assembling an adequate corpus. The German case is complicated, mainly because the country’s violent history, with two World Wars and two dictatorships, has left several desiderata for historical journalism research. We subdivide a hundred years of journalism history into different phases, and for each of these we discuss different approaches with regard to the availability, accessibility, and usability of sources in digital form. We conclude that digital archives and digital sources open up new techniques for historical journalism research, including methods such as automated content analysis and text mining. Nevertheless, new technological and cultural environments of news pose genuinely new challenges and require new skills and literacies to cope with journalism history through digital archives.

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