Who makes journalism? · The Century of Journalism

The decline in the number of journalists is related to a long-lasting crisis, which is above all connected with a changed media setting and a resulting crisis of the once-established financing models, which we want to trace here. That we know so much about journalists at all, we owe, as said, today above all to the Worlds of Journalism Study, an international research project that has been examining the working conditions, values, role conceptions and challenges of journalists worldwide since 2007 (https://worldsofjournalism.org). This international research cooperation is meanwhile supported by UNESCO, among others, and today covers about 75 countries (WJS3). In the previous survey wave, more than 27,500 journalists in 67 countries had been surveyed between 2012 and 2016. Thomas Hanitzsch had launched the project at the Department of Media and Communication of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The first survey (WJS1) was carried out from 2007 to 2011 and covered 21 countries around the world. With the publication of the results of the second wave in 2017 in Publizistik the German project team (Steindl et al., 2017) deliberately placed itself in the tradition of the two studies on journalism in Germany carried out until then (JouriD I and II), which my doctoral supervisor Siegfried Weischenberg and his team had conducted at that time in Münster and Hamburg (Weischenberg et al., 1993; 1994; 2006a; 2006b). These in turn were modelled on the studies of The American Journalist, which David Weaver in particular, with his colleagues Cleve Wilhoit and Lars Willnat at Bloomington University in the US state of Indiana, has been conducting since the 1980s and, although already emeritus, is still conducting (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986; 1996; Willnat, Weaver, & Wilhoit, 2017; 2025). Here, too, results of many of the studies inspired worldwide by Weaver and his colleagues were published together under the title The Global Journalist (Weaver, 1998; Weaver & Willnat, 2012).

Here, too, changes over time can be observed in German journalism, which also required adjustments in research. For example, the most recent figures for Germany no longer break down completely the journalists who worked in television for 2023. Private broadcasting is still divided into radio and TV, but public broadcasting is recorded as a whole, because the “editorial division by output channels radio, TV and online has largely dissolved” and the newsrooms instead work “trimedially along thematic or geographical lines”: “For this reason, public broadcasting was no longer subdivided as before, but recorded as one segment.” (Garmissen et al., 2025, p. 8). Such a bundling had, however, already existed in the first survey of the study Journalism in Germany (Weischenberg, et al., 1993, p. 27), so that here, too, analyses over time are possible overall, to which we will return again and again as we move through the decades.

The transformations of journalism show themselves precisely in these survey difficulties for researchers. In the most recent survey (WJS3), for example, the “integrated newsroom of Spiegel 2022/2023 was recorded in the magazine segment.” In the survey period 2012-2016 (in WJS2), “Spiegel and Spiegel Online had still been surveyed as two separate units.” The research team was guided by “the historical-cultural origin of the respective journalistic-editorial brand.” (Garmissen et al., 2025, p. 9)

This also explains, for instance, why the current figures show “only” just under 7 percent of journalists in online journalism. In the survey period 2012-2016 (in WJS2) it was still 16 percent. Online journalism is by no means in retreat, however – rather, as the example of Spiegel shows, only what is called online native is now recorded as online journalism: “Even if very few respondents assign themselves to the online-only segment, serving online channels is, for the overwhelming majority of journalists today, a matter of course in their work.” (Garmissen et al., 2025, p. 15)

It is striking and overdue that journalism is becoming ever more female. In 2023, 44 percent of those interviewed are female. In 2014/2015 it was still 40 percent, in 2004/2005 it was 37 percent and in 1992/1993 only 31 percent (cf. Garmissen, 2025; Steindl et al., 2017; Weischenberg et al., 1993; 1994; 2006a; 2006b). However, inequality remains in the levels of hierarchy, the employment relationship and pay. Women in journalism still earn less than men, are less often permanently employed and less often head of a department (Garmissen et al., 2025).

The thesis “The future is freelance” on the basis of the WJS2 data (Steindl et al., 2018; Freischreiber, 2025) cannot be confirmed in this form. Rather, the 2025 data suggest that it is precisely full-time freelance journalism that is coming under pressure (Garmissen et al., 2025, p. 16): “For freelance journalists it is therefore difficult to make a purely journalistic living. The main fields of side jobs are public relations and corporate communication (31.4 %) as well as education and training (28.0 %; n = 220).” Although there are now again countervailing tendencies, for example in the field of podcasting, which we will come back to later. What is important here is that the studies on journalism in Germany deal only with journalists who work in journalism as their main occupation. For the operationalization of main-occupation status “it is stipulated that respondents must either spend at least half of their working time on journalistic activities or derive at least half of their total income from journalism – if not both apply anyway.” (Garmissen et al., 2025, p. 7).

And what do journalists who work in journalism as their main occupation, permanently employed or freelance, earn from their profession? Compared with the previous study (WJS2), monthly net income in journalism in Germany has developed upwards overall, although the researchers assume here “that the unusually high rise in the inflation rate, especially since 2020, has largely levelled out the income increases.” (Garmissen, 2025, p. 13)

The question of professional role conception is one of the questions that particularly preoccupies the journalism researcher and inventor of the Worlds of Journalism Study Thomas Hanitzsch. He has put a great deal of time and energy into the continual further development of the research and of the typology of role conceptions. In his contribution to the handbook Journalismusforschung, which he published in 2025 together with Wiebke Loosen and Annika Sehl (Hanitzsch et al., 2025), he writes about journalistic roles (Hanitzsch, 2025) and in doing so also uses a division that he developed together with our American colleague Tim Vos.

In his review of the development of research on journalistic role conception, he begins with Bernhard Cohen (1963) and Morris Janowitz (1975), who each still divided US journalists in two, the former having distinguished between a neutral and a participant role and the latter between “the objective, detached and neutral gatekeeper on the one hand and the actively advocating advocate on the other” (Hanitzsch, 2025, p. 488). Renate Köcher, for example, also made such a division in her study of British and German journalists, distinguishing between “bloodhounds” and “missionaries”: “While British journalists see themselves as bloodhounds – as hunters of news – their German colleagues see themselves as missionaries.” (Köcher, 1986, p. 63). This is a thought that the journalist Dagmar Rosenfeld took up again in 2024: “When I think of German journalism, the question comes to mind: ‘Are you still writing, or are you already on a mission?’”

Finally, David Weaver and Cleveland Wilhoit, already mentioned, introduced in their studies of The American Journalist (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986; 1996) a threefold division “into disseminator (spreading news), interpreter (analysis and contextualization) and adversary (critical scrutiny)” (Hanitzsch, 2025, p. 488). Later the role of the populist mobilizer (mobilizing the audience) was added.

In 2025 he sees German journalism still shaped by a role conception that is based on neutral information, impartial mediation and factual analysis. At least four out of five of the journalists surveyed consider it “extremely” or “very important” to be “an impartial observer”, to “put current events into context and analyse them” and to “report things as they are. (Hanitzsch, 2025, p. 497)

We, too, were able to establish above all stability in role conception in our project and in the interviews with journalists from different generations (Birkner et al., 2024). In order to be able to draw a comprehensive picture of the development of journalism, we decided, besides analysing news over time from 2024 back to 1924, also to conduct interviews with journalists and to try to cover as wide a range as possible in age, gender and medium. In terms of age, we also interviewed journalists who are already retired, these being predominantly men. And of course we have not been able today to interview any journalists who worked for the radio in 1934. Among the younger ones up to 40 years of age, more women were included at the time of the interviews, between September 2021 and January 2022, so that our sample reflects in miniature quite well the development of the feminization of journalism. As a limitation it can be added here that a young female journalist of 25, who has only worked in journalism for a few years, can say less about the change in the industry than those mostly middle-aged journalists whom we also interviewed.

And despite a media environment that is changing, in part dramatically, the role conception of the journalists we interviewed remains stable:

"My self-perception hasn’t changed at all."

However, the interviews do clearly express how much journalistic work is changing, and that the decisive turning point before AI is the fanning-out of societal communication across platforms.

"I now find it much, much more natural that social media has become part of journalistic work and that you develop different formats for different platforms. I do that in my own work, too.